The main difference is that the conservative, more or less intellectually-minded imprint, Bloomsbury, changed the title. My guess is to make it sound less populist and more… I don’t know. High-minded.
Whatever. I got from the library in an orgy of Roger Scruton borrowing, so I guess, not much lost. Perhaps even a net benefit because I might have gained some small amount of muscle from carrying it home. Not much though. It’s an even smaller book in this edition.
I knew of Barzun as one of one of the New York intellectuals of the fifties and sixties, but only knew of him; I’d never read him.
But after reading an essay by someone who knew him (I can’t remember where I read; some right leaning publication, I believe, but one of those who mostly try to ignore Trump and assert some intellectual legitimacy to the right), I thought I should rectify that.
For better or worse, all the library had was his immensely long, late in life, magnum opus.
A couple of things struck me while reading it.
First, a fascinating aside about Hamlet within another aside about Shakespeare. He points out that it is a modern understanding to think of him a vacillating. In fact, Barzun argues, he was being judicious in a difficult environment. It is no small thing to kill a king and dangerous if you fail; also dangerous if you succeed, because you are vulnerable in the short term to popular unrest or the ambitions of nobleman who sees opportunity in the inevitable chaos. That he was not indecisive is proven, he writes, by Fortinbras saying, upon finding the scene of slaughter at the end (I am giving nothing away, I hope), that Hamlet would have made a great king. Surely, if Hamlet were the waffling type, this would not be the case. He also suggests that Laertes is included to point out the contrast between an impetuous character and a careful one; Laertes’ recklessness makes him an easy tool for Hamlet’s uncle. It also nicely matched an interesting (but not great) production of Hamlet that I saw at the Folger, where the director challenged the actors and audience not to focus on psychology, but on the actions of the characters.
Second, I am an elitist. I already knew this. But Barzun is writing elite, cultural history. He is not Braudel. He’s not even a Durant. He is an apostle of high culture. And, well, I like reading about that. That said, his brand patrician elitism can elide decency and slip into something distasteful, as in his off hand, Malthusian remark about “the rapid increase in people as hygiene and medication recklessly prolong life.” He was in his nineties when he wrote this book.
What did I learn? Well, it is the sort of magisterial, grand work one doesn’t find so much anymore, so one does learn a lot. Too much to sum up. But…
I’m not sure that counts as learning, but his thesis that monarchism is the key to unlocking an understanding of the baroque was fascinating, even if I am not qualified to judge it.
His portraits of cities as exemplars of particular times – Venice in the mid seventeenth century or London in 1715 – are as masterful as they delightful, until they are not. Paris in 1830 is oddly, mostly about German thought. His pastiche of 1895 showed an unsurprising indifference.
It feels like, and this especially struck reading his reading of the twentieth century, that the figures he most enjoys are more contemporary ones whose style harkens back to the witty and learned diaries, essays, and criticisms of Samuels Pepys and Johnson and the men who filled the pages of the Tatler and its siblings of the eighteenth century. But he does namecheck Garbage, one of the great bands of the nineties (the 1990s, that is), even if disparagingly (in the context of band names that are… bad? Dirty? Filthy?)
Should you read Barzun? Probably. He is Eurocentric and not terribly interested in non-white cultures, but these deep flaws don’t make him unreadable. Indeed, he is a witty writer. Lines like “a thin slice of antiquity for a large spread of modern butter,” in reference to French baroque culture’s preference for Roman over Greek antiquity struck me very nicely.
Like reading Heidegger on Nietzsche, you do not read Scruton to understand the topic so much as to understand and appreciate Scruton. Unlike reading Heidegger on anything, reading Scruton is a pleasurable and generally understandable experience.
He is also the sort of conservative that liberals like me love. Certainly, contemporary, burn-it-all-down conservatives of the Trump-Cruz-Rubio-Hawley variety would not appreciate. I would say, without too much to back it up, that his conservatism is uniquely English.
The conceits that drive this book is first that it does not pretend to be primer or history or proper summary of any kind, but rather a book which attempts to delve into the questions and philosophical ideas that he loves. The second is that each chapter ends on a question and the next offers a (sort of) answer.
An old fashioned, sort, chapter three is entitled demon, Descartes’, of course. Following a discussion of truth which I found surprising, because I didn’t find the expected semi-materialist foundationalism overlayed with a sort of nebulous Anglican theism.
But what did I learn about Scruton? His surprising, constant returns to Kant. His completely unsurprising belief in a horde of liberal moral relativists storming the barricades in nigh overwhelming numbers, seeking to banish Shakespeare.
That he probably wished to refute some philosophers as Johnson did Berkeley, but knew it would have been intellectually indefensible, but the desire remained.
That he likes to drop names, some famous (Kant, Spinoza) and some a little less known to the general public (McTaggart).
That despite his constant name dropping of Kant and references to Kant’s morality, when it really comes to the time to succinctly explain morality, he settles on Scottish Enlightenment style sentimentalist theories.
That he criticizes continental philosophy (which he also calls romantic) and praises its less well respected and read (in his mind, and probably in truth; at least, less read) Anglo-American, which is to say, analytic, philosophy, but is, himself, fairly clearly writing in a more ‘romantic’ tradition and very clearly is not a traditional Anglo-American philosopher.
That his ‘philosophy’ of sex is rather sweetly romantic.
That he probably blamed the Enlightenment for many things.
That his religious sympathies seem aligned with how he described Roman religion, which was about, in his description, attention to forms and rituals as social glue, rather than a deep belief. Honestly, you’d have expected him to be a High Anglican (though definitely not Anglo Catholic) on account of his cultural Toryism. I’ll also recommend this article from The Critic.
And, finally, that he is not an interesting philosopher. Like most philosophy professors, he is not even, really, a philosopher, I would say. Just a marvelous cultural critic (with whom I deeply disagree in many key ways) of the sort that one can never be sure will be remembered in another generation.
This is, more properly, about my having finally finished my little collection of Thomas Jefferson’s writing (with a short, mostly hagiographic biography at the very beginning). I have, of course, been chronicling those things which struck me upon reading. I have also been putting this down for many other books, including many about Jefferson himself. Despite my wrestlings, he still occupies my mind, rent-free. Something he has really done since I was a young child and my mother took to Charlottesville, Virginia and up the mountain to see Monticello. She preferred the simpler beauty of George Washington’s Mount Vernon home, but the erratic intellectual cacophony of Jefferson’s home stayed with me.
So what should I say about this book? I don’t know if the selected letters, which constitute the greatest part of the book, are the best selection possible, but I enjoyed them.
I can say that Jefferson is a fine writer. He has the belle-lettres excellence of the best eighteenth century scribblers and the clarity of the his English and Scottish Enlightenment influences (Locke, Hume).
I can say that he grew a bit resentful in his old age, with the late Alexander Hamilton still receiving approbation two decades after Burr’s ball felled him.
I suppose that I can say that I will continue to read his writings and writings about him.
And, that while not a philosopher, he might have made a fine one, except that his mind wandered towards too many other things. No matter. He has done enough to be remembered, loved, reviled, and revised without a philosophical magnum opus.
I do not think that it is a coincidence that the most obviously philosophical moments are from letters written later in life, when he stepped back from the business of being a revolutionary and a politician.
That said, in 1803, while president, he writes to Dr. Benjamin Rush about a conversation that they had in 1798-1799, before the contentious presidential election of 1800 about Jesus and moral philosophy. He begins to outline the ideas that would come to truest fruition in his ‘edited’ version of the Bible, but roams, comparing Jesus to figures of classical philosophy like Socrates, Epicurus (Jefferson, in other letters, suggests that he is an Epicurean), Epictetus, Cicero, etc, to the purpose of sketching out a moral philosophy (not theology) of Jesus.
Then, towards the end of his life, he wrote to John Adams and lays out an explicitly materialist epistemology (despite bad mouthing Hume and points, the Scotsman would have been proud, though its probably closer to Locke).
But even in the last case, the original topic or, at least, the topic which most directly led to his philosophical musings are religious ones. You cannot escape the conclusion that he is a Deist (in one letter, he praises the Unitarian Church for dispensing with the whole Trinity thing), but also that he ultimately considers religion to be a philosophical topic, rather than an issue of faith.
In a letter to his friend, mentor, and former professor (from his days at William & Mary College), the Scotsman and an, by virtue of his teaching of Jefferson, important evangelist of the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment in American, William Short, Thomas Jefferson sums up his interpretation of the Epicurean philosophy:
Syllabus of the doctrines of Epicurus
Physical. – The Universe eternal. It’s parts, great and small, interchangeable. Matter and Void alone. Motion inherent in matter which is weighty and declining. Eternal circulation of the elements of bodies. Gods, an order of being next superior to man, enjoying in their sphere, their own felicities; but not meddling with the concerns of the scale of being below them. Moral. – Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness. Utility the test of virtue. Pleasure active and In-do-lent. In-do-lence is the absence of the pain, the true felicity. Activity, consists in agreeable motion; it is not happiness, but the means to produce it. Thus the absence of hunger is an article of felicity; eating the means to obtain it. The summer bonum is to be not pained in body, nor troubled in mind. i.e. In-do-lence of body, tranquility of mind. To procure tranquility of mind we must avoid desire and fear, the two principal diseases of the mind. Man is a free agent. Virtue consists in 1. Prudence. 2. Temperance. 3. Fortitude. 4. Justice. To which are opposed, 1. Folly. 2. Desire. 3. Fear. 4. Deceit.
His description of how the gods interact with humanity does not just reflect the ideas of Epicurus, as we know them, but also deism (which, I would argue, reflects the beliefs of Jefferson and Washington, at least, among the Founders; though it is not typical of the mostly staunchly protestant thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, but rather of the French Enlightenment; of course, that greatest of all figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, was almost certainly atheist).
For the belief in the gods has not been established by authority, custom or law, but rests on the unanimous and abiding consensus of mankind; their existence is therefore a necessary inference, since we possess an instinctive or rather an innate concept of them; but a belief which all men by nature share and must necessarily be true; therefore it must be admitted that the gods exist. And since this truth is almost universally accepted not only among philosophers but also among the unlearned, we must admit it also being an accepted truth that we posses a ‘preconception,’ as I called it above, or ‘prior notion,’ of the gods.
Besides the fact they were all important philosophers, the magician connection is missing. I don’t mean that I wanted some sort of connection of party tricks, only that it’s a little disappointing that this title clearly seems picked just because it sounded cool, rather than because it relates to some extended metaphor or thread which snakes through the book.
But it’s a good book. Enjoyable for academic and for more dilettantish readers of philosophy.
While it made me want to dig up my copy of Being and Time (which I read in college, but almost certainly failed to understand), I wish that the other philosophers, particularly Cassirer, had had their philosophical positions explicated in as much detail as Heidegger’s. But then again, Heidegger continues to loom large, even now, so perhaps it’s only fair.
Especially knowing how the story ended, I found myself deeply wishing that poor Walter Benjamin had ever gotten an academic posting and what could have been if he had ever gotten some semblance of stability in his life. C’est la via.
I mean, I read it all, but my little one was not so enthralled by this one. But this one is more complex. Crito, which we read together, is shorter and really just has two characters (Socrates and Crito). Phaedo features an interesting conceit, but possibly a confusing one for young readers. Phaedo and Echecrates speak in traditional dialogue format, but most of the dialogue is Phaedo reciting what he heard on the day that Socrates died, which was mostly a dialogue within a dialogue between Socrates, Simmias, and Cebes (Crito was also there, but mostly just cried at the end)
A reminder that beyond his philosophical genius, Plato was no mean writer, it also has a surprisingly moving account of Socrates drinking the poison and dying.
The dialogue draws upon themes in other works, including his theory of knowledge as recollection (originally posited in Meno, I think, but I’m really not sure) and a light dusting of his theory of forms. But it’s all in service of Socrates explaining to his admirers, don’t cry for me, Athens. Because, the soul is immortal and the best part of him will be going to a much better place. Or maybe be reincarnated. That’s suggested early on, but the old man’s final moments imply that the soul goes to place of pure, happy contemplation.
This book had been happily sitting in my ‘one day to acquire and read list’ with not much hope of moving on to a less passive state when The Washington Post took it upon themselves to review his follow up publication, which caused me to bestir myself and pester my local library to lend me a copy of the earlier book.
My father would greatly enjoy reading about the first figure Mishra biographs, Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani, which is mostly fictious name (a Shi’a Muslim from Persia, he adopted ‘Al-Afghai’ to imply he was from mostly Sunni Afghanistan), classic sort of roving intellectual who traveled to many of the cultural capitals of the nineteenth century (Calcutta, Alexandria, London, Paris, Istanbul, and Moscow) as a sort professional public intellectual, sometimes making a living by giving informal lectures or classes to young, educated Muslims, sometimes as journalist, and always seeming to espouse a sort of pan-Islamic movement that was simultaneously slightly secular, while also being fundamentalist.
Liang Qichao was also new to me, though Mishra rather muddled him up with other figures, so that my sense of his importance was similarly muddled. Poor Tagore… the first non-white person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. If the author didn’t really know what to do with him, why include him? The point seems to be, he was important because he’s kind of famous, but maybe his ideas went nowhere (so how did he remake Asia, in that case?).
Japan is posited as a simply fascinating intellectual center in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and I finished the book wishing that Mishra would write that book for us.
…but in its main ideasAristotle’s philosophy is Plato’s philosophy. The one clothed in poetry; the other in formulae; the one had the more entrancingvision, the other a clearer and more exact apprehension; but there is no essential divergence.
What else? It’s an excellent primer, but, to be frank, I’m not sure I needed one. He does a nice, short survey, starting with the Milesians and going through to Epicurians, Stoics, and Academics/Skeptics. Those last three are better known for their popularity in Latin philosophy and Marshall is oddly disdainful of them. It’ almost like he felt compelled to wrest them from the Romans, but still felt things should have ended with Aristotle.
the coffee philosopher 