Béla Hamvas - one of the greatest metaphysical thinkers of the 20th century

 

ONE OF THE GREATEST metaphysical thinkers of the 20th century was Béla Hamvas, a Hungarian writer whose wide range of interests included literature, cultural history, history of science, psychology, philosophy and Eastern Asian languages. He was a non-conformist, whose æsthetic views were attacked by György Lukàcs 1 , resulting in the banning of his works from publication after 1947

From 1948 he lost his job and was forced to work on building sites and as an unskilled labourer in factories. Most of his writings were only published posthumously, after the early 1980.

Béla Hamvas had the greatest admiration for John Cowper Powys, whom he often quotes in his works. In 1946 and 1947 there was an exchange of correspondence between the two men and although Béla Hamvas’s letters to John seem to be lost, John Cowper’s answers were published in The Powys Journal III, 1993, with a moving postface by Katalin Kemény, Hamvas’s wife, whose annotated translation of Rabelais into Hungarian is still a reference today.

In April 2007, a Conference was held at Balatonfüred in Hungary, on Karneval (1948-1951), Hamvas’s major work. About forty people came to Balatonfüred, a charming city on Lake Balaton. They came from Hungary but also from France, Germany, Roumania, Serbia and Slovenia. The greatest part of the conference was dedicated to the as yet partial translation into German of Karneval. This complex novel of exceptional length (3 volumes), a ‘human comedy’ spanning continents and ages, which was published in Hungary in 1985, has so far only been translated in full into Serbian. Béla Hamvas is now recognised as a major writer in Hungary but is still more or less unknown outside his own country. His Philosophy of Wine and a short essay, Trees 2 , have both been translated into English together with various other essay

JCP’s famous One Hundred Best Books (1922) may have served as a model to Hamvas for A szàz könyv (One Hundred Books), which contains a list of one hundred writers or works which should be read by every cultured reade

Hamvas selects almost the same writers as JCP: Homer, Euripides, Horace, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, as well as the greatest English writers from Shakespeare to Sterne, Wordsworth and Keats. There are however some noticeable difference

Rousseau, not Voltaire, Dostoïevsky but also Gogol, Goethe’s Faust, but Hölderlin too. In Hamvas’s book, written more recently than Powys’s, one also finds Joyce and, of course, Powys himself as number 100. Hamvas has added to his list ancient texts from India (the Upanishads), Tibet, China, as well as the Aramaic Zohar, Pascal, Thomas à Kempis, Master Eckhart or Jakob Böhme. He also mentions the Mabinogion, which in 1922 was not a preoccupation for Powys. But in Hamvas’s “Puppet-Show” neither Walter Pater, Conrad, Henry James nor Thomas Hardy are to be found. Below is section n° 100 which Hamvas devoted to Powy

100. Powy

Most writers, poets and artists play on a single intrument, even the richest, such as Dante or Shakespeare. There are only very few works that use four or five voices simultaneously. But John Cowper Powys in his works scores for a symphonic orchestra and this dizzy symphonic polyphony has  at first a crushing effect; then, after a while it begins to play a refreshing role in one’s life; and finally it becomes life’s prime necessity. No matter whether you read the great Wolf Solent or the even greater Glastonbury Romance, or any of the essays such as In Defence of Sensuality or The Art of Happiness or the Pleasures of Literature: in all these works you will find a resounding and sonorous and clamouring stream of words. It was the sea that taught Powys how to write. And it is the whole, the complete, the total and universal man that speaks through him, and in his works you will find all the attributes and aptitudes and qualities and parts and capabilities and failures and errors and crimes of mankind, and you will find there all its spirits and ghosts and ancestors and descents and angels and demons and devils.

Béla Hamvas sent Powys his book together with his own translation of the above extract. On 11 March 1947 John Cowper Powys replie

O how deeply I was honoured and gratified by all you said fo me in your 100 Books. I was so pleased. It was excellent of you my dear Béla Hamvas, to send that good translation with the beautifully printed origina

I am so proud to possess this little volume! Aye! it gives me such deep satisfaction to be a living character in your beautifully presented Puppet-Show of a whole Planet’s writer

And O my friend how wonderfully you have handled our coarse-grained heavy-hitting frost-bitten sea-sandy and sea-shoal rocky tongue

in this discourse of yours on the Golden Age and the Apocalypse. I have put this precious document away among life-kept treasures & shall keep it safe till I die.

J. Pe4 !y!l.d:3 s s:s:r.s.y.s..el4 !y!l.d:3 s s:s:r.s.y.s..lt4 !y!l.d:3 s s:s:r.s.y.s..ti4 !y!l.d:3 s s:s:r.s.y.s..ie4 !y!l.d:3 s s:s:r.s.y.s.. till I die.4 

J. Peltier

ONE OF THE GREATEST metaphysical thinkers of the 20th century was Béla Hamvas, a Hungarian writer whose wide range of interests included literature, cultural history, history of science, psychology, philosophy and Eastern Asian languages. He was a non-conformist, whose æsthetic views were attacked by György Lukàcs 1 , resulting in the banning of his works from publication after 1947.

From 1948 he lost his job and was forced to work on building sites and as an unskilled labourer in factories. Most of his writings were only published posthumously, after the early 1980s.

Béla Hamvas had the greatest admiration for John Cowper Powys, whom he often quotes in his works. In 1946 and 1947 there was an exchange of correspondence between the two men and although Béla Hamvas’s letters to John seem to be lost, John Cowper’s answers were published in The Powys Journal III, 1993, with a moving postface by Katalin Kemény, Hamvas’s wife, whose annotated translation of Rabelais into Hungarian is still a reference today.

In April 2007, a Conference was held at Balatonfüred in Hungary, on Karneval (1948-1951), Hamvas’s major work. About forty people came to Balatonfüred, a charming city on Lake Balaton. They came from Hungary but also from France, Germany, Roumania, Serbia and Slovenia. The greatest part of the conference was dedicated to the as yet partial translation into German of Karneval. This complex novel of exceptional length (3 volumes), a ‘human comedy’ spanning continents and ages, which was published in Hungary in 1985, has so far only been translated in full into Serbian. Béla Hamvas is now recognised as a major writer in Hungary but is still more or less unknown outside his own country. His Philosophy of Wine and a short essay, Trees 2 , have both been translated into English together with various other essays.

JCP’s famous One Hundred Best Books (1922) may have served as a model to Hamvas for A szàz könyv (One Hundred Books), which contains a list of one hundred writers or works which should be read by every cultured reader.

Hamvas selects almost the same writers as JCP: Homer, Euripides, Horace, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, as well as the greatest English writers from Shakespeare to Sterne, Wordsworth and Keats. There are however some noticeable differences:

Rousseau, not Voltaire, Dostoïevsky but also Gogol, Goethe’s Faust, but Hölderlin too. In Hamvas’s book, written more recently than Powys’s, one also finds Joyce and, of course, Powys himself as number 100. Hamvas has added to his list ancient texts from India (the Upanishads), Tibet, China, as well as the Aramaic Zohar, Pascal, Thomas à Kempis, Master Eckhart or Jakob Böhme. He also mentions the Mabinogion, which in 1922 was not a preoccupation for Powys. But in Hamvas’s “Puppet-Show” neither Walter Pater, Conrad, Henry James nor Thomas Hardy are to be found. Below is section n° 100 which Hamvas devoted to Powys:

100. Powys

Most writers, poets and artists play on a single intrument, even the richest, such as Dante or Shakespeare. There are only very few works that use four or five voices simultaneously. But John Cowper Powys in his works scores for a symphonic orchestra and this dizzy symphonic polyphony has  at first a crushing effect; then, after a while it begins to play a refreshing role in one’s life; and finally it becomes life’s prime necessity. No matter whether you read the great Wolf Solent or the even greater Glastonbury Romance, or any of the essays such as In Defence of Sensuality or The Art of Happiness or the Pleasures of Literature: in all these works you will find a resounding and sonorous and clamouring stream of words. It was the sea that taught Powys how to write. And it is the whole, the complete, the total and universal man that speaks through him, and in his works you will find all the attributes and aptitudes and qualities and parts and capabilities and failures and errors and crimes of mankind, and you will find there all its spirits and ghosts and ancestors and descents and angels and demons and devils.3

Béla Hamvas sent Powys his book together with his own translation of the above extract. On 11 March 1947 John Cowper Powys replied:

O how deeply I was honoured and gratified by all you said fo me in your 100 Books. I was so pleased. It was excellent of you my dear Béla Hamvas, to send that good translation with the beautifully printed original.

I am so proud to possess this little volume! Aye! it gives me such deep satisfaction to be a living character in your beautifully presented Puppet-Show of a whole Planet’s writery!
And O my friend how wonderfully you have handled our coarse-grained heavy-hitting frost-bitten sea-sandy and sea-shoal rocky tongue!

in this discourse of yours on the Golden Age and the Apocalypse. I have put this precious document away among life-kept treasures & shall keep it safe till I die.4

J. Peltier

Flaubert on women

 

To ERNEST FEYDEAU Croisset, Tuesday evening, January II 1859 

... No, my friend! I do not admit that women are competent to judge the human heart. Their understanding of it is always personal and relative. They are the hardest, the crudest of creatures. “Woman is the desolation of the righteous,” said Proudhon. I have little admiration for that gentleman, but his aphorism is nothing less than a stroke of genius. 

As far as literature goes, women are capable only of a certain delicacy and sensitivity. What is truly lofty, truly great, escapes them. Our indulgence toward them is one of the reasons for our moral debasement. All of us display an inconceivable cowardice toward our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, our wives, and our mistresses. In no other age have women’s breasts been the cause of more vile actions! And the Church (Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman) has given proof of the greatest good sense in promulgating the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—it sums up the emotional life of the nineteenth century. Poor, scrofulous, fainting century, with its horror of anything strong, of solid food, its fondness for lying in its mother’s lap like a sick child! 

“Woman, what have I to do with thee?” is a saying that I find finer than all the vaunted words of history. It is the cry of pure reason, the protest of the brain against the womb. And it has the virtue of having always aroused the indignation of idiots. 

Our “cult of the mother” is one of the things that will arouse the laughter of future generations. So too our respect for “love”: this will be thrown on the same refuse-heap with the “sensi¬ bility” and “nature” of a hundred years ago. 

Only one poet, in my opinion, understood those charming animals—namely, the master of masters, Shakespeare the omniscient. In his works women are worse or better than men. He portrays them as extra-exalted beings, never as reasonable ones. That is why his feminine characters are at once so ideal and so true. 

In short, never place any faith in their opinion of a book. For them, temperament is everything; they are only for the occasion, the place, the author. As for knowing whether a detail (exquisite or even sublime in itself) strikes a false note in relation to the whole—no! A thousand times no!

I note with pleasure that printers’ ink is beginning to stink in your nostrils. In my opinion it is one of the filthiest inventions of mankind. I resisted it until I was thirty-five, even though I began scribbling at eleven. A book is something essentially organic, a part of ourselves. We tear out a length of gut from our bellies and serve it up to the bourgeois. Drops of our hearts’ blood are visible in every letter we trace. But once our work is printed—farewell! It belongs to everyone. The crowd tramples on us. It is the height of prostitution, and the vilest kind. But the convention is that it’s all very noble, whereas to rent out one’s ass for ten francs is an infamy. So be it! . . .

from the book Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert

Curtius on Das Glasperlenspiel

Hesse, who had many ties with Basel, adopted Switzerland as his homeland. Transposed into the Utopian "Castalia," it becomes the setting of Das Glasperlenspiel.

The work has been called a novel of education. That is one of its many aspects, but it does not touch the core of the book. We can approach it more closely by asking our­ selves why Hesse picks up the theme of education again, and why he presents Joseph Knecht first as a student, then as a teacher, and finally as "magister ludi," the master of the game. Unterm Rad depicts the boy's failure in school. In Das Glasperlenspiel the delinquent pupil catches up on his schooling, as it were, and becomes a teacher himself (at a monas­ tery school, like Narcissus). Thus a theme from Hesse's early period is taken up again in his latest, changed in value from negative to positive, and "reconciled on a higher level." Not just this theme alone. All the poet's themes (among which we found conflicts but also attempts at a cure) are taken up again and treated contrapuntally in this work. The Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung des Joseph Knecht [Essay at a Description of the Life of Joseph Knecht] is the last and now definitively realized transposition and sublimation of all those personal histories in which Hesse depicted himself as Camenzind, as Giebenrath, as Sinclair, as Siddhartha, as Goldmund. All those personal histories crystallized around conflicts: conflict with the home and its pietistic atmosphere; with the school; with the middle-class world; with society in general. Finally, too, the conflict with the chosen profession —that of literature. As late as 1927 the poet notes: "As for myself, I am certain that no respectable, hard-working person would ever shake my hand again if he knew how little I value my time, how I waste my days and weeks and even months, with what childish games I fritter away my life." A fifty year-old writer who cannot stop playing games and admits it with a bad conscience. But is the play-instinct something to be ashamed of? Undetected and unanalyzed residue of a bour­geois prejudice! Play and the capacity for play is one of the most important functions of man's relation to the world. A learned historian of culture has meticulously examined Amer­ican Indian games in order to confront homo sapiens with homo ludens. Animals and men play, and so do the Gods, in India as in Hellas. Plato views man as an articulated puppet fashioned by the Gods perhaps for the sole purpose of being their plaything. What conclusion shall we draw? The play-instinct is to be affirmed. A negative converted into a positive.

To play one's own game with the deep seriousness of a child at play. The highest achievement would be—to invent a game of one's own. This the poet has succeeded in doing. He is the inventor of the glass bead game. He has learned to master it: the game of life, the game of the beads. Thus he has become in two senses of the word magister Iudi (in Latin ludus means both "game" and "school"). The glass bead game is the sym­bol for the successful completion of the school of life. The discovery of this motif determined the conception: at once inspiration and stroke of luck; the seed from which the golden blossom sprouted.

Motif and theme are two diferent things, and critics would do well to distinguish between them. The motif is what sets the fable (the "mythos" in Aristotle's Poetics) in motion and holds it together. Motif belongs to the objective side. Theme comprises everything that concerns the person's primary orientation toward the world. The thematics of a poet is the scale or register of his typical reactions to certain situations in which life places him. Theme belongs to the subjective side.

It is a psychological constant. Motif is given by inspiration, discovered, invented—all of which amounts to the same thing. He who has nothing but themes cannot attain to epic or drama. Or, for that matter, to the great lyric. Here we touch upon a law of aesthetics the best formulation of which I find in T. S. Eliot: "The only way of expressing emo­tion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." By means of the motif, the "objective correlative," the insuf­ficiencies of personal experience are overcome. The motif is an organic, autonomous structure, like a plant. It unfolds, forms nodes, branches out, puts forth leaves, buds, fruit.

Once the bead game was in existence, a whole world had to be built up around it. That could only be an imaginary world, i.e., a Utopia, or a Uchronia (Renouvier's concept). But this world had to be transferred to an era which was not too dis­tant in time from our own. For elements of our own culture must still survive in Castalia. Hence a—somewhat labored— introduction is necessary to serve as a bridge between the twenty-second and twentieth century. This allows for a cri­tique of our age, but, what is more important, it demonstrates that the glass bead game has precursors in every epoch of the European mind. This means, however, the integration of western tradition into Hesse's spiritual universe.

And the Orient? Like all the main themes of the poet it is crystallized on to the new structure. The work is dedicated to the "Travelers to the East." The psychic techniques of Yoga are practiced in Castalia. India reappears in Indischer Lebenslauf [The Indian Life]. Nevertheless, the role of guide has passed to China. Castalia has a "Chinese House of Studies," it even has, as in a rococo park, a Chinese hermitage called the "Bamboo-grove." There one finds gold­ fish ponds, yarrow stalks for consulting the oracle, brushes and water-color bowls: pretty chinoiserie. But when the her­mit is invited to Waldzell, there arrives in his stead only a daintily-colored Chinese letter containing the irrefutable as­ sertion: "Movement leads to obstacles." Seneca, Thomas a Kempis, Pascal had stated something similar, if with less pre­ciosity. Thus Das Glasperlenspiel also concludes and crowns the poet's Oriental cycle. And yet the world of the East is not the essential core of the book but rather the decorative back­ ground. Its effect is "antiquarian," as Demian says of Dr.
Pistorius's Abraxas-mythology.

Das Glasperlenspiel is a western book. An ancestry is es­tablished for the bead game originating with Pythagoras and Gnosticism and continuing through Scholasticism and Hu­manism to the philosophy of Cusanus, the universal mathe­matics of Leibniz, and even to the intuitions of Novalis. Two names, however, with which only the fewest readers might be expected to be familiar, are mentioned with especial piety: Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687-1752) and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-1782), great Swabian theologians, in whom a strict belief in the Bible was united with apocalyptic doctrines, theosophy, chemistry, and Cabbala. They are in­ termediaries between Bohme, Swedenborg, and Schelling. Oetinger was pastor at Hirsau, near Calw, where Hesse was born. The prominence given these names implies the resolu­tion of the conflict with the Swabian Pietism of his home and, by the same token, a rapprochement with Christianity. This rapprochement is further evidenced by Knecht's intimacy with Pater Jacobus and the Order of St. Benedict.

Castalia, too, is an Order. So Hesse's oldest theme is drawn into the organization of the work: the theme of the monas­tery. It is most remarkable how this theme too is transformed by a newly-won freedom. As he has invented his own game, so the poet has invented his own order. Psychologically this means: he has become his own master. By his own full power he can impose the authority with which he will comply. What had, as a neurotic conflict, been a stumbling block becomes, through "anagogy," a building block. The revolt against all external authority is now recognized as the passionate search for an authority derived from his own inner law. Joseph Knecht passes through all the degrees of the Order, submitting voluntarily to its regulations. After long service, long master­ ship, he "awakens" (we recall that Goldmund was "awak­ened" by Narcissus). Knecht's inner law compels him to quit the Order. His departure takes place in the prescribed cere­monial forms. To be sure, the administration of the Order cannot approve of this step. As he is about to leave, Knecht says to himself: "If only he had been able to explain and prove to the others what seemed so clear to him: that the 'arbitrariness' of his present action was in reality service and obedience; that it was not freedom he was going toward but new, unknown, and uncanny obligations; and that he was go­ing not as a fugitive but as one who is summoned, not will­ fully but obediently, not as master but as sacrifice." So, after five decades, the boy's flight from the monastery school is re­ peated, only with its signs reversed from negative to positive;

recast and purged of all slag it has come to be understood in its deeper significance: as a level of transcendence. In this work of the poet's old age, all the previous stages of his life have become transparent to him. It was conceived on the level of "illumination."

Where is the awakened teacher of the Order summoned by his inner law? To the "world outside," the ordinary human world beyond Castalia's serene precincts. The "unknown ob­ligation" toward which he is moving is—death. But this de­ parture for the unknown, no longer of a wandering scholar but of a man who is "summoned," is the heroic setting-out of the Nordic man whom Oriental absorption does not re­strain. Final confirmation of the return to the West; Prot­estant nonconformism; Düreresque knight-errantry.

One last point! We found that in Hesse psychoanalysis and Oriental wisdom were attempts at healing neurotic conflicts. In addition, a theme to which we have barely alluded, although it runs through all the books from Peter Camenzind on—the escape into alcoholic intoxication. Das Glasperlen-spiel is the result and testimony of a self-cure, the only cure that is dignified and genuine because it proceeds from the very core of the person. Psychoanalysis, Yoga, Chinese wis­dom, were only expedients. He who has been "awakened" no longer needs them. The conflicts are resolved in a blessed new period of creativity. It is brought on by the discovery of the bead game. This functions as the center around which the person and the productivity of the poet are reorganized. The resolution of discords is the great new experience. That is why music is so important in the work. It is a symbol of euphony and concord, of rhythmically articulated spiritualization— harmony with the All.

A more precise analysis, a more searching appreciation of the rich late work I must leave to others.
1947

from the book Essays on European Literature by Ernst Robert Curtius

Religious experience put at the service of self-reflection

We observe that Du Bos, the virtuoso of conver­ sation, is transformed while dictating into a virtuoso of the monologue. What intoxicated him was to hear himself talk.
The sound of his voice made him sensible of the uniqueness of his ego—  ["that zone of uniqueness in us that quivers, stirs, starts to vibrate and communicates to everything we say those inflections of the voice, that continuity of sound waves, those caressing prolongations of the pedal. . ."]. This should be compared with the early admission (Extraits, 108; 5 Oct.["there are moments when I feel as though caught in my own spell, and I do not succeed in breaking the enchantment"]. At the time Du Bos put down this sentence, he had not yet started to dictate. But strange! when he later came to compare his older, handwritten journals (they go up to 1920) with the ones he had dictated, he found him­ self compelled to acknowledge the higher value of the former:

["the slowness implicit in the very act of writing leads to a degree of artistic perfection which gets lost in a dictated journal so much the more as rapidity is the norm. From the point of view of art, since 1922 . . . I have lost a great deal"].

Of the early, handwritten Diaries13 we possess only the fragments that were deciphered for the Extraits d'un Journal of 1928. Du Bos was right to prefer them to the dictated jour­nals. They have a higher literary quality. That the writer ad­mitted it to himself shows that, within certain limits, he was capable of self-criticism. But these starts were not followed up. He skirted, or so it seems to me, the basic problem. He did not analyze that "headiness" he enjoyed while dictating, did not submit it to "introspection" (Introspections is one of the titles he was considering for the contemplated autobiog­ raphy). He must otherwise have discovered that it was his facility in improvising that intoxicated him; that intoxication of any kind conjures up pseudosublimities, pseudorealities, pseudovalues; and that virtuosity borders dangerously upon psychic automatism, which means running idle. Perhaps he might also have asked himself whether the attitude of im­provised dictation was compatible with the conduct of an inner examination and depth analysis that is supposed to be served by self-scrutiny and that alone can justify it. In order to descend to the bottom of the soul and dive for pearls, a state of composure must have been attained; nothing must distract us from concentration upon the inner vision and from the expenditure of energy necessary to trace it in words— nothing, not even the sound of our own voice. When it is in­ dispensable for heightening the emotional euphoria, we are nearly at the point at which dictation turns into aria and the virtuosity of parenthetical insertions into coloratura (by a strange misapprehension Du Bos spoke of this as the "polyphony" of his Diary). What always drew his mind like a lodestar was self-absorption, the apprehension of pure in­wardness. Can this be achieved otherwise than by silence and solitude? Is it possible to have a meditation a deux? But this was precisely the paradoxical situation in which the later Diary originated. It required the presence of a devoted secre­tary with the understanding and background for such taxing work. Could she resist the spell of the modulations in which exquisite insights were conveyed?

In a man of Du Bos's temperament the return to faith could only aggravate the problematical aspects of the Diary rather than settle them. Does he still have the right to confide his inner states to dictation now that they transcend psychol­ogy and concern religion? Hasn't he been charged with a new responsibility? And won't it have a crippling effect? He feels an obscure urge he had hardly known before: to be silent—  ["to be silent, to conceal my­ self, to burrow into the ground, to resolve my problems only on the vital level, short of and beyond all expression . . ."].
He thinks of himself as a difficult case:  It dawns on him that "simplicity" of spirit will forever elude him— ["the impossibility, in which I suspect that I shall always remain, of once more achieving complete simplicity on the level of the spirit"]. He must surely have been familiar, if not from the Imitatio Christi then from Walter Pater, who makes it his point of departure (in "Diaphaneite" in Miscellaneous Studies), with the ideal of sibi unitum et simplificatum esse. This was denied him. Perhaps it might be attained in an exalted hour while taking a stroll.

Or it might suddenly shine forth at the turn of a solitary path in the woods—not in a library in the presence of a lady taking shorthand. In any event, Du Bos once did advance far enough to encounter silence as a demand. But he was unable to achieve it. The less so as his new adherence to the ritual and tradition of the Church was presenting him with a new emotional richness—"le journal religieux dont chaque matin je porte en moi tous Ies elements" (iv, 183). The ideal would be to write a religious diary every morning ("et de preference avant midi") and a psychological diary every evening.

Of course this idea could not be carried out. But that it could be conceived at all betrays—a want of psychology. From the conversion on, the Diary presents a mesh of the "merely-human" and the religious that cannot be untan­ gled. Du Bos always liked to refer to his intellectual world as his "house of thought."14 Now a new guest has entered this densely populated abode—Faith. One of the old residents is scrupulosity ("la maladie du scrupule"). From this situation new tensions arise. What is my faith? To what extent is it real? "Π est tres probable," replies Du Bos to his own ques­tion,  ["It is very probable that I have at least as much, if not more, faith than nine-tenths of the be­ lievers . . ."]. Is this pride, as he has so often been told? No:

— ["I am convinced that in my case it is not a matter of pride, or at least not only of that"]. How much is revealed by this qual­ification! How prematurely is self-examination broken off here! One has the impression that religious experience is put at the service of self-reflection. When Du Bos is reminded by a verse from the Bible of the commandment to be meek, the result is the following entry:  ["Meekness—what a chapter for 'Introspections' this divided attitude toward it all my life!"]. Which does not deter him from presuming to state in the same dictation: ["I am in the middle of my theocentric period"].

He had learned about Berulle's theocentric mysticism from Bremond's recently published history of French religious sen­ timent and appropriated it with the naivete of the novice. Once he goes so far as to dictate a prayer to God (iv, 157ff.) in which he begs for illumination. Woven into it are a char­acterization of Cesar Franck's music and a quotation from "Thy Claudel."

The diaries that have been published so far end with 31 December 1928. Hence the entire last decade is still missing (Du Bos died on 5 August 1939). Du Bos's religious devel­opment during this phase remains hidden from us. What we can survey is merely the early history of his conversion and the initial reaction to it. What sort of a reaction is it? Pre­dominantly, it involves a greater seriousness toward his own personality, which has after all gained in value through its new experiences. It has become familiar with signs of grace, which are expertly defined by the spiritual director ("en ce moment vous etes l'objet d'une grace actuelle," says the Abbe, iv, 105). This places a heavy weight of responsibility upon the personality, the first fruit of which is the Dialogue avec Andre Gide.

from the book Essays on European Literature by Ernst Robert Curtius

NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET

 

Far more modest in size and limited in scope is the last book written by the late William S Haas, The Destiny of the Mind, East and West (New York, Macmillan; 319 pages). Professor Haas does not attempt to formulate or even suggest a philosophy of history, but he does isolate and identify a phenomenon that will have to be taken into account in formulating a valid theory of history.

Professor Haas attacks — and I believe, demolishes — an assumption that underlies almost all modern theories of history: that the minds of all human beings, if not defective or disordered, work in essentially the same way.

I suspect that Haas's work will instantly convince every Westerner who has made a really intensive study of an Oriental culture. He will find in the book a sudden clarification of his own disconcerting experience. Reading it, he, like the heroine of one of Edith Wharton's best stories, "will say, long after, that was it!"

I should suppose that no one begins serious study of an Oriental culture without a certain romantic enthusiasm, for nothing less is required to surmount the very formidable linguistic barriers. It takes a long time to surmount them, and during that time the student's studies seem to bring him ever nearer to a fundamental unity of mankind underlying the diversity of regional cultures. But when language has ceased to be an obstacle, there inevitably comes, sooner or later, a day when the student has to admit to himself that the more he learns, the less he understands. He is confronted by minds whose operations he can glimpse from time to time, but cannot follow. He realizes, for example, that to the Hindu mind it simply does not matter whether George Washington lived earlier than Christopher Columbus or later. And then he realizes that he cannot himself really understand how it is possible to think about events without considering the sequence in which they occurred. While pondering that enigma, he will perceive that he has been translating Hindu doctrines into the terms of Western thought, assuming that each proposition has logical antecedents or consequences of which there is usually no trace in the original texts, and so he comes to suspect that his understanding of a specific doctrine, such as Vedantic karman or the Buddhistic skhandas*, is no more a reproduction of what the doctrine means to a Hindu mind than Puccini's Madame Butterfly is a reprod uction of life in Japan. He can learn a great deal about such doctrines, to be sure, but only so long as he remembers that he is an observer standing outside a barrier that he can never cross.

Professor Haas went through this common experience, but he resolved to ascertain precisely what the barrier was. In the book that he wrote as the conclusion of many years of study, he identifies and by copious illustration demonstrates the existence of two generically different mentalities. The Occidental mind, which appears fully formed in the earliest Greek philosophers and has not since changed, is the mind of conceptual thought — of thought directed from the mind toward an object. So completely are we dominated by this mentality that the only way in which we can think about ourselves is by placing ourselves momentarily in the position of an outside observer looking at us — we must try (as best we can) to make an objective study of ourselves. The Oriental mind, which appears fully formed in the earliest Upanishads, does not think conceptually; its thought is never directed away from itself. The Oriental mind cannot separate what it is thinking about from itself.

The capacity for objective thought is peculiar to the philosophical mind of the West. For the Oriental mental configuration, Haas coins the term philousian.

One consequence of this distinction is that there is, and can be, no Oriental philosophy; for when we apply the word "philosophy'' to an Oriental doctrine, we misrepresent it as grossly as though we were to call a woman's intuition "logic". It also follows that there is no Oriental mysticism. Mysticism is the term by which the philosophical mind designates what is for it a leap over the logical steps of conceptual thinking; the term therefore misrepresents a mental process which is not conceptual and in which, therefore, there can be no leap.

The Western mind simply cannot understand the Eastern mind without disowning itself. And not even then, unless it destroys its own capacity for the only kind of thinking that it recognizes as rational.

Professor Haas, as a conscientious scholar, warns us that his conclusions concerning the Orient are based on his own observations in the two fields in which he is specially competent. Thus he is primarily concerned with India and secondarily with China.

The use of India as the primary source of data greatly simplifies the problem: it shows that the difference in mentality cannot be a result of linguistic structure and suggests that it may not be racial. When we study a language of radically different grammatical structure and basic metaphors, such as Hebrew or Japanese, we realize that persons who think in those languages must do so in a way that seems very strange to us, though not necessarily by a different process; but Sanskrit (with its derivative, Pali) is an Indo-European language. Although it is more complicated, it does not differ from English or German or Greek in its basic way of expressing thoughts. And if the philousian mentality appears in the Upanishads, it is noteworthy that most students are inclined to believe that the earliest of those "mystic" rhapsodies were written before the Aryan blood was absorbed in the teeming masses of polyphyletic India, which would make it seem likely that the authors were Aryans themselves.

Professor Haas's analysis may need to be refined or elaborated, and it is entirely possible that there are more than two kinds of thinking. But by showing that there is a difference so fundamental - a difference more elemental and deeper than Spengler's idées maîtresses - the author has, I believe, done for the study of comparative history what Böhr did for atomic physics.

Although Professor Haas in his concluding chapters reveals a certain pessimism, as though he shared the fashionable view that our only future is liquidation, he and Professor Voegelin agree in regarding the unique civilization of the West as a unity — a single continuity that runs, with fluctuations but no break, from the ancient Greeks to ourselves. How crucial this conception is may be seen from the two books to which I now turn which deny such a continuity.

* So called skhandas are phenomenal descriptions of various aspects of experience and as such are universal. Inability to understand the meaning of these descriptions is caused only by lack of intellectual capacities.

Oliver Revilo

Cioran as a black sheep

 

At a table next to Sartre, who confidently draws on his pipe, sits a quiet young man, chain-smoking cheap Gauloises. Modestly but correctly dressed with coat and tie, his fedora hat carefully placed on top of a heavy navy overcoat folded next to him on the red velvet bench, there is a vaguely foreign, un-French air about this man, something formal and old-fashioned which strikes an odd note in the bohemian atmosphere of the café. He has a remarkable face: a head of light-colored hair like a lion’s mane, brushed backward, piercing green eyes under a permanently frowning brow and a pinched, willful mouth set in a square jaw which he pushes forward in a moue of great determination. He comes every day, from eight to twelve in the morning, two to eight in the afternoon, and nine to eleven at night. “Like a clerk.”1 He smokes and listens to the heated arguments at the next table. He always sits next to Sartre but never says a word to him. Simone de Beauvoir is also there. Whenever she takes out a cigarette, the young man stands up, bends towards her ceremoniously, and, still silent, lights it for her. She thanks him with a nod of her head; he nods back respectfully and sits down. Every day that winter the silent ceremony is repeated. No one ever asks who the foreign-looking young man is. Every day, he sits without a word next to the “idol” of the French cultural scene. Is he never “tempted” to speak to the idol?2

The young man’s name is Emil Cioran. At the time we see him eavesdropping on Sartre and his group, he is a Romanian doctoral student, in Paris on a renewable fellowship since 1937. But he hasn’t yet written a single line of his thesis. He never will, in fact. He is not really a student; he is a writer. Nor is he as young as he seems: though thirty-three is not old for a doctoral student, some of Cioran’s apparent youth is a feature of his foreignness, which he will cultivate as a permanent aspect of his persona.

He is not even a French writer, yet. His equivocal position on the margins of Sartre’s group, gravitating around the axis of French intellectual authority, always silent but always present, sums up this ambitious and divided young man, in quest of a center that will focus his own creative energy. In Romania, he is well known, the published and controversial author of five books and numerous articles. In Paris, in 1943–44, he is nobody, just an exile from Eastern Europe, hoping to make a name for himself in the City of Light. He is finishing a book about Nazi-occupied Paris as symbol of the final decay of Western civilization. But the book, written in Romanian, will remain, forgotten or abandoned, in manuscript form until its publication in 1991. For the young Romanian suddenly decides, the very next summer, to abandon his native language and to write henceforth in French, at last to break into, as it were, the conversations of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (...)

In retrospect, young Cioran’s silent position next to Sartre at the Flore was not at all accidental. Cioran chose it deliberately. He watched and waited like a spy, quietly measuring his forces against Sartre’s to find out his own worth. “My path was the reverse of Sartre’s,” he said later, even though his essay on Sartre in the Précis, “On an Entrepreneur of Ideas,” shows how much Sartre’s model was on his mind.7 He could speak as well as Sartre, he had read much more, he would write as well as they—Sartre’s circle—were writing. His silence was not shyness or intimidation, but inordinate pride. With his body strategically placed on the margins of fame, Cioran made a statement. He was nearly inside the magic circle of Sartre and French cultural life, which had enormous prestige in the eyes of European intellectuals, especially marginal Europeans like Romanians. Just outside the circle, or rather on its border-line, the ambitious interloper worked silently and tenaciously in isolation for another five long years—scribbling away like Dostoevsky’s underground man, in the cheapest hotel rooms in the Latin Quarter—to gain the place at the table he had marked out for himself, next to Sartre, publicly recognized in France. But unlike Dostoevsky’s underground man, whose “revenges” were never more than pathetic failures to impress imaginary opponents, Cioran’s “revenge” was a blazing success. Hailed by Nadeau as a “twilight thinker,” by André Maurois as the new “moralist or immoralist,”8 by Claude Mauriac for “masterly language . . . closer to Pascal than Vigny,”9 the Romanian-born Cioran had not merely arrived on the French literary scene; he blazed across it like the meteor, symbol of obscurely powerful poetic genius, in Mallarmé’s poem, “calme bloc icibas chu d’un desastre obscur”10 [calm [granite] block fallen down here from some dark disaster].

This is the story my book has to tell: how an unknown young man from the margins of Europe, with a fanatic will to transform himself, achieved fame “in a country where prestige is everything.” Tnis biography covers the crucial first stages of his career, from 1911, the year of his birth, to 1949, the year of his consecration as a French writer, which marks his final break with his Romanian roots.
(...)
Emil Cioran first saw the light of day on April 8, 1911, the second of three children born to Emilian Cioran, one of the Orthodox village priests and his twenty-two-year-old wife, Elvira Comanici. They already had a three-year-old daughter, Virginia (Gica), and two years later Cioran’s younger brother, Aurel (Relu), would be born. As the oldest son, Cioran was given his father’s name.
Emil(ian) is not a traditional peasant name. It is a Roman, Latin name—as are Virginia and Aurel(ian)—chosen by the parents expressly for its Roman connection.

The choice of a Roman name for a Romanian child in multi-national Transylvania of the Austro-Hungarian empire was a political statement. Like many other children of educated Romanians, the Cioran children were given names that were meant, first, to affirm the Latin origins of the Romanian people, as opposed to the non-Latin origin of the other nationalities of the region, the Hungarians and Germans, and, second, to suggest that as the descendants of the Romans, the original colonizers of the province, the Romanians had more right to exist on its territory than the other populations, who arrived later during the Middle Ages.

Cioran’s first name thus already marks the newborn child twice, investing him with a split identity. As a Roman name, it claims that he is a son or citizen of Rome, legitimizes his birth, placing him in a noble, heroic lineage. However, as a Romanian name—that is, the kind of name used by a certain class of Romanians—it sets him apart as marginal and lower caste in another empire, the Austro-Hungarian, where the Romanians’ right to be is questioned and their existence merely tolerated. In its former capacity, the name participates in a national fiction of self-definition and survival; in the latter, it denotes a historical reality.

On the other hand, his family name marks him literally as a black sheep even among his own people. According to the genealogist Mihai Rădulescu, “cioran” derives from a Slavic word for black and was applied to black sheep (and their shepherds) who ranged far away beyond the Carpathians in winter, sometimes as far as the Crimea.19 If any Cioran might be said to have fulfilled the destiny of his etymology, it was E. M. Cioran, whom we might call a “black sheep” in spades.

Furthermore, generations of Romanians in Transylvania had been haunted by a need for self-definition which they hoped would lead to political self-determination.

Like all other Romanian nationals born in pre–World War I Transylvania, Cioran inherited at his birth an “identity problem” which was existential in a literal sense, since the very existence of Romanians in the Austro-Hungarian province was questioned on political and historical rather than metaphysical ground.

Searching for Cioran Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston 

Kant and Heiddeger on being alone

 Kant, for his part, distinguishes between inferior and admirable reasons for wanting to be alone:

We must, however, remark that separation from all society is regarded as sublime, if it rests upon Ideas that overlook all sensible interest. To be sufficient for oneself, and consequently to have no need of society, without at the same time being unsociable, i.e. without flying from it, is something bordering on the sublime; as is any dispensing with wants. On the other hand, to fly from men from misanthropy, because we bear ill-will to them, or from anthropophoby (shyness), because we fear them as foes, is partly hateful, partly contemptible. There is indeed a misanthropy (very improperly so-called), the tendency to which frequently appears with old age in many right-thinking men; which is philanthropic enough as far as goodwill to men is concerned, but which through long and sad experience is far removed from satisfaction with men. Evidence of this is afforded by the propensity to solitude . . .13Kant otherwise warns against a learned philosopher eating alone, as he will lose his vivacity and mental gaiety, exhausting his thoughts and, furthermore, allowing him to miss out on those thoughts he could have enjoyed in conversation with others.14 Placing such stress on the idea that a philosopher should seek out society is rather atypical. As we shall see, it is more common to consider solitude a prerequisite for philosophical discernment.

(...)

Surprisingly enough, solitude remains an undeveloped theme in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. As far as I can tell, the expression does not appear in Being in Time (1927), but the phenomenon is briefly addressed in his lectures from 1929–30, and appears in isolated places in his later writings. Still, we find no overall discussion of solitude in his works. One main problem with Heidegger’s philosophy is that the ‘I’ has a tendency to hide from itself by erecting a kind of wall of ‘self-evidence’ against itself.43 The goal is to make the self transparent in order to grasp an authentic life.44 Our being is always a being-with, and being-with others is just as intrinsic as being-in-the-world.45 That is the reason solitude can exist. If others were not already a part of my existence, solitude would not be a problem, because it would not exist. Being-with is wholly compatible with not being with others – it is wholly compatible with being a hermit – but even a hermit cannot avoid the thought that he is a self in a world with other selves.46 However, Heidegger also has a tendency to emphasize that being left to oneself is actually the most innate condition. Every single one of us is predetermined to die.47 Our being is a being-until-death. Death is a negation of who you are, but it is also that towards which you are always moving. Death individualizes. It is I myself who will die. No one can die my death for me, as they might do some other job for me, such as doing the cleaning or making a meal. Death is my death, a moribundus sum that reveals itself to us as anxiety.48 Because death as such belongs to you alone, anxiety individualizes you and draws you back into yourself. According to Heidegger, however, this withdrawal is also a condition where the bonds to all other people are torn asunder, and such tearing is a prerequisite for living in freedom, truth and actuality.49 Heidegger argues that our concrete being-with becomes irrelevant in this condition.50 He uses the expression ‘existential solipsism’, that is, that in an existential sense one’s I is the only thing that exists.51 In that state, you are thrown entirely back on yourself, and all ties to others are cut. When you enter into truth and freedom, then, it is a freedom and truth without ties to others. That is the background for Heidegger’s assertions that philosophical discernment requires solitude. Solitude can essentially be regarded as a kind of degenerative phenomenon for Heidegger, since being alone is described as an inferior mode of being with others, but for Heidegger solitude is simultaneously a prerequisite for an authentic life. Therefore it is also a prerequisite for an authentic community. For example, he writes that there are certain things that prove determinate for a community, but which cannot grow within a community – just in the individual’s solitude.52 For Heidegger, the way to self-knowledge passes through solitude. He writes that in solitude people come close to the essential in all things, close to the world and close to the self.53 It is only in solitude that you can become who you are. And all true philosophy takes place in ‘enigmatic solitude’.54

From A Philosophy of Loneliness

Lars Svendsen