It’s Becoming

Portrait of Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger

What the mathematician John Allen Paulos (Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences) doesn’t take into consideration in his recent Science Times piece “The Advanced Metrics of Attraction” (NYT, 7/14/14) is the power of non-existence. Taking inspiration from Alain de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life), who has apparently been opining on crushes, Paulos attempts to accommodate Nobel prize economist Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) and Baye’s theorem, which he describes as “a mathematical proposition that tells us how to update our estimates of people, events and situations in the light of new evidence." Paulos quotes Kahneman in describing two kinds of thinking, System I which is “fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic and subconscious” and System 2 which is “slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating and conscious.” But actually the kind of crushes that have you falling in love with women or men who you’ve seen through a crack in a blind, or at the moment the doors of a subway car are closing are the essence of the romantic agony. Young Werther knew all about such infatuation, which really represents the triumph of imagination over reality. How can something which is known all too well and is defined by its finitude compare with that which has yet to be and which represents infinite possibility? Intuitive versus logical learning and statistics aside, doesn’t the truth about love really go back to metaphysics? Hegel had it right when he distinguished between being and becoming. And when it comes to passion being is always going to play second fiddle to that which has yet to be.

The Life and Death of the World Historical Figure

At the end of his short encomium to Mandela in The New York Review of Books, “On Nelson Mandela (l918-2013)," J.M. Coetzee writes, “He was, and by the time of his death was universally held to be, a great man; he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows.” Then who will rescue us? Where is the hope? Even without the notion of God, it’s nice to believe that history takes a human shape. It’s something like the spirits that haunt Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Hegel believed in dialectic and historical necessity. But like a nuclear bomb which requires a powerful detonator, history has its servants, or World Historical Figures. Thomas Carlyle subscribed to the greatman theory of history, but such anthropomorphizing flies in the face of the variegated web of social and economic conditions which are the petrie dish that produces political leaders. Would Hitler have come to the fore, without a Versailles Treaty? You make your bed and then have to sleep in it. Would Roosevelt have prevailed without the Depression, Gandhi without British colonialism, Lenin without the Czars and Mandela himself without Apartheid? If Apartheid hadn’t been instituted, then Nelson Mandela might have ended up being a high powered lawyer. Look around you, how many determined men and women of great character, have become merely competent or even great in their jobs instead of being world historical figures? Is Mandela the last of the great world historical figures, or is it a little like Six Characters in Search of an Author? Is it a matter of timing and the fact that the world has become so complex that the outlines of history themselves blur the prospect of greatness? Perhaps we no longer appreciate the great men and women in our midst since it’s more difficult for them to shine out. Barack Obama is a source of disappointment to some who thought he would be great, but maybe the multivalent problems he has faced make his greatness harder to appreciate.

World Historical Figure

Kimberly White/Reuters

In its coverage of the death of Hugo Chavez the Times used the following statement from Javier Corrales, a professor of political science at Amherst as the quote of the day: “In regimes that are so person-based, the moment that the person on which everything hangs is removed, the entire foundation becomes very weak because there was nothing else supporting this than this figure.” (“Chavez Dies, Leaving Sharp Divisions in Venezuela,"NYT, 3/5/13) This is the theory of Hegel’s “world historical figure” par excellence. Under this idea there would have been no Third Reich without Hitler, no Gulag without Stalin or, for that matter, no modern day India without Gandhi. The latter is belied by the fact that while Gandhi plainly played a huge role in helping his people to achieve independence, his spirit is scarcely visible in a country where the right wing Hindu, Baratiya Janata party plays such a huge and regressive role in the country’s inflammatory religious and racial politics today. Under this theory the killing of Osama Bin Laden as documented in Zero Dark Thirty is the equivalent of a manichean fairytale, like the Knights of the Round Table where the forces of light conquer darkness. As a litmus test it will certainly be interesting to see what new forms of political life are spawned in the petrie dish of post-Chavez Venezuelan politics. But what about the individual as an expression of historical forces? What about history as a pressure cooker in which idealogues appear at the moment when the cup runneth over. Wasn’t National Socialism a franchise, as much a Leninism, and even the pacifism of Gandhi which found itself on the stage of American history in the person of Dr. Martin Luther King? History might be handed to great men or women on a platter, but without a mountain of circumstance (which inevitably defies the will of any single individual), there would be no revolution, right, left or center.

Lincoln

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was a seminal work in shaping thinking about consciousness and history. Steven Spielberg has created the cinematic equivalent of Hegel in Lincoln. You don’t need or want Hollywood if you’re trying to make a Bergman movie or Jules and Jim, but there’s a place for Hollywood when you’re seeking to create a sense of the grand and the majestic, the cinematic equivalent of a classic l9th century novel. And only the director of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, the hugely underrated A.I. and Empire of the Sun could have the resources to bring together so many iconic actors--Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, Hal Hobrook--in addition to the composer John Williams and the Chicago Symphony orchestra to make this Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. What is remarkable is that the movie based upon Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln moves so seamlessly from the private world (it’s fun to realize that Abe and Mary had the kind of guilt inducing fights that bring modern couples into marriage counseling) to the historical stage on which the politics by which the 13^th Amendment to the constitution, outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude, is so keenly described. You begin to understand where Roosevelt and LBJ learned their lessons and you would wish Barack Obama would attend the same school, but history is the real subject of Lincoln and Spielberg’s liberal use of the close-up makes the movie look like Mount Rushmore. Those who grew up in the 50’s will remember Random House’s children’s series of Landmark Books which had titles like Lee and Grant at Appomattox. The imprint that Spielberg’s Lincoln leaves is a little bit like the power those simple titles had over the child’s imagination.

The Sufferings of Young Gerhard

photo: Hans Peter Schaefer

Corinna Beltz’s movie about Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter-Painting currently playing at Film Forum bears comparison to Hans Namuth’s famous film of Pollock and will likely elicit similar questions--about artistic product and process--to those raised by the Namuth film, when it was released in l950. Is the act of Richter moving his squeegee along the surfaces of the varying canvases that appear in the film where the art manifests itself (ie the artwork, like in “action painting,” being a memento of a creative act, that has already occurred) or does the talent and genius reside in the actual composition, the final product that goes out into the world? A side issue is Richter’s obvious interest in Hegelian dialectics, in being and becoming. His squeegee both creates and destroys and what looks finished is what has yet to be undone and conversely what appears to be inchoate turns into an essay on what is good, which Richter also equates with a morality that flies in the face of the estheticism we generally associate with abstraction in art. The Hegelian dialectics not only exist in in the inception of a singular work of art, but between paintings. “Each painting is an assertion that tolerates no company,” Richter comments. Whatever Richter is, an enigmatic Chauncey Gardiner figure to whom we attribute more than actually meets the eyes, or along with his contemporary Anselm Kiefer (the subject of another recent documentary, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow) one of the giants of our era is a discussion that none of the cast of characters who appear in the film, who include Marian Goodman, the Manhattan gallerista, Norbert Arms and Hubert Becker (his two assistants) and a number of internationally known museum directors are likely to entertain as they contribute to his hagiography. Richter, as the film  plainly shows, with its elaborate architectural models of the walls of upcoming exhibition venues, is an industry whose artistic pedigree is established with shots from an earlier film of his youthful self (despite his talk about painting being a secretive act, Richter is plainly not the withdrawn Kafkaesque figure he makes himself out to be) disclaiming theories of art like a character in a bildungsroman we might have called The Sufferings of Young Gerhard. However, unlike another painter industrialist named Damien Hirst, the film displays Richter as an artist who executes his own work.

Alas Poor Yorick Stuff

If one could describe the preconscious thought process of average human beings, satiation of appetite and the desire for attention might be in a Hegelian dialectic with the fear of death, except for those who enjoy a surfeit of what is known as suicidal ideation. For Suicidal Ideationalists, who are sometimes also followers of German Idealism (with its search for overarching metaphysical assertions, which lead to a level of frustration resulting in suicidal thoughts), and who probably comprise a good part of the Hemlock Society’s mailing list, suicide constitutes a form of hope. Plainly there are people who regard suicide as a good thing, to the extent that it is an escape from the burden of existence. The poets Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and Anne Sexton all committed suicide. Clinical depression may have driven their decisions, but who is to say that extreme mental pain must be endured, any more than the physical pain that Dr. Kevorkian attempted to eliminate through assisted suicide. In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus asserts that, considering the nature of the purposeless world in which we live, suicide is the only philosophical question that is important. One thing is certain: those who commit suicide have a level of control that those of us who open medical reports with trembling hands don’t get a chance to experience. For the average person who is not a member of the Hemlock Society, Death and Life are enemies (in the famous sequence from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Max Von Sydow plays chess with Death). The Faustian bargain wherein the soul is swapped for knowledge ultimately involves a search for the kind of immortality that Ray Kurzweil champions in The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which dying organs are replaced by microprocessors. But from another point of view, death may not be regarded as an enemy. Death is as much a part of the evolution of man as life, and without the death of cells (apoptosis), new cells would not be born. Death is the final life passage and the ultimate change. We are afraid of death because we are set in our ways and don’t want to let go. However, is it possible to accept death and even embrace it? Is that what it means to die with dignity? 

War of the Worlds

Lingua Franca and Social Text, Hagler and Hearns, Nixon and Kennedy, Plato and Aristotole, Coleridge and Wordsworth, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, Heraclitus and Zeno, light and dark, hot and cold—marriage in general. Whereas one commentator on the institution once said seemingly oppositional partners displace onto each other desirable attributes, such as reserve or gregariousness, it’s unfortunate that so many people grow to hate the differences they once loved, admired, and envied.

Hegel’s philosophy of history was based on the idea of opposition. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis were the terms he used. In modern terms, Walmart and Amazon go to war and give birth to a new discount giant. What will be the synthesis of these two oppositional elements—Walzon? In the Enlightenment, the pessimism about human nature posited by Hobbes and the clearly idealistic vision of man portrayed by Locke coalesce in the framing of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights—checks and balances, the inalienable rights of the individual in the face of the democratic rule of the majority, all are products of two opposing views of human nature.

   

In the 20th century, communism lost out to capitalism, but historical progression created the curiosities of elites within the Politburo and the decline of class in the mercantile structure. But what are the new warring forces of our present age? Fundamentalism (in both its religious and political incarnations) versus globalism, literal versus abstract, uni- versus cyber-verse, e-mail versus snail mail (no contest). Then there are the oppositions that are still-born, like pre-op transsexuals who maintain both female and male gonads without fusing into a new creature.

Naturally those who analyze the market seek to discover the answer to such oppositions on a daily basis, considering that profits lie in the secrets of mergers and acquisitions. Will Citicorp continue as an unruly giant, or will it be forced to sell some of its divisions? Google has already triumphed over Yahoo, but will an emboldened adversary come to the fore, developing a new service called Houyhnhnm? Big- and small-world theories, special and general, relativity, quantum, and string—the war of the worlds continues.