Reading Fast and Slow

Beauvoir, Kazantzakis, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer

Yesterday I was reading Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), volume II (Lived Experience), chapter 12, translated as “The Woman in Love” (« L’amoureuse »).

This is in preparation for the salon I’m hosting this coming Tuesday with Kate Kirkpatrick. (Please get in touch if you would like to attend!)

Simone de Beauvoir writes like a god. She simply asserts, more boldly than any modern writer I know with the exception of Spinoza — and yes, by “modern writer” I mean any writer in the modern era.

She makes none of Kant’s excuses, is far less playful than Hume, and so certain is she of her assertions that she deigns to use even less evidence than Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s bluster we sometimes sense vacillation or evasiveness; the sheer abstraction of the early Wittgenstein or early Heidegger renders their enormous ambitions less visceral than Beauvoir’s.

Beauvoir sometimes uses the literary examples, from novels with which she never doubts that the reader must be familiar, to drive home a general point with a single incisive thrust — what does it matter to a god, that her example is fictional?

To me, to be clear, this is beautiful, powerful writing. While not all of her observations remain as timeless as her style, her confidence is worth beholding, whatever one may think of what she is saying — and much of what she is saying still stands, still sticks, still stabs. She no more cares what you think than the Book of Genesis does, because she is writing from hard-won experience and exhaustive study. The best you can do is behold.

Kate Kirkpatrick, who wrote Becoming Beauvoir in 2020, wrote “Love is a joint project” in Aeon that same year. Beauvoir’s chapter foregrounds the grim reality women faced in the 1940s — their lack of rights, their absence of agency, their only hope drown themselves in love, to suppress their claim to being human in favour of fusing with a male “sovereign subject.”

But Kirkpatrick focuses on the joint project of authentic love. This contrasts with two alienated forms of “failed love” which Beauvoir identifies, namely narcissism and devotion. In any relationship, one can be too self-centred or too selfless — and both are forms of selfishness which preclude an equal partnership.

The contrast between love and alienation will be the topic of our salon.

What are these salons?

A salon is a gathering for discussion, reading, and (historically) music. They first took off in Italy and France in the 17th Century, peaking in the 18th Century and arguably ending with the French Revolution. There was a subsequent resurgence in Paris in the 1920s, perhaps more familiar to those of us alive today, involving figures like Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Picasso.

If you’re interested in the history of salons, my friend Justine wrote a book called The Beautiful Soul about the same philosophical phenomenon in early 19th century Germany, which sought to emulate the intellectual ardour and general character of Goethe.

I have hosted Interintellect salons since 2020, first online and now in-person. They are inclusive, energetic, and friendly conversations around a given topic. While there is not normally music, the vibes are great. People attend to learn and connect, not to show off or argue.

What else are you reading?

I’m glad you asked. This week, I read Zorba the Greek in three days, for my book club. Last week, on Michael Tanner’s advice, I read Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in four.

The Birth of Tragedy begins at a spanking pace, and the momentum never lets up. It is a good idea to read it for the first time as fast as one can, ignoring obscurities and apparent diversions from the central argument. […] Such an initial reading certainly involves taking a lot on trust, but to subject it to critical scrutiny the first time through is a recipe for irritation and ennui. It is important to get the sense of flux which the book possesses and which is to some extent also its subject-matter.

— Michael Tanner, Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction (2000)

Both The Birth of Tragedy (1872; revised 1886) and Zorba the Greek (1946) are about the tension between two strategies for life which I describe in my book, Neither/Nor.

For Nietzsche, Apollonian art represents something else: the Homeric epic depicts the Trojan War; the sculpture depicts the draped woman. Dionysian art, by contrast, simply is — or better, does its thing. Traditional non-lyrical music is Dionysian. It expresses and embodies its own life energy without reference to anything else. In my reading, the former strives towards truth, and the latter strives towards life.

Nietzsche inherits and modifies this distinction from his textual educator, Schopenhauer, for whom the world can be understood in two ways: via the will (Nietzsche’s Dionysus) or via representation (Nietzsche’s Apollo). For Schopenhauer, the will is Kant’s noumenon, the “thing-in-itself,” the way reality “really is,” as opposed to the representation to be found in the phenomenon, the abstractions we form on the basis of our senses.

Kant thought that, because all of our experience occurs only within the senses, we could never know what lay beyond the senses, what caused them, what the “thing-in-itself,” wholly independent from the categories of our mind represented. Schopenhauer, though he greatly admired Kant, disagreed, arguing that through the body, we can know the thing-in-itself — not conceptually, but because we are the thing-in-itself. For Schopenhauer, Kant’s noumenon is the will (though this force is broader than “conscious human will” which is only one manifestation). Schopenhauer’s “will” leads to Nietzsche’s later focus on the “will to power,” though I suspect Nietzsche’s position is more human and less metaphysical than Schopenhauer’s.

In Zorba the Greek, the novel for which Kazantzakis is best known, the narrator represents the representative. He is prone to abstraction and detachment. He reads books and theorizes. This is all classically Apollonian, or Schopenhauer’s “representation” — book knowledge. He is interested in Buddhism, though it’s more like Nietzsche’s slightly caricatured understanding of the Buddha as a life-denying abnegation than it is like an understanding of the Buddha from someone familiar with the Pali Canon.

I stretched out on my bed, extinguished the lamp, and began once again to transpose reality according to my loathsome, inhuman practice, removing its blood, flesh, and bones in order to reduce it to abstract ideas and to connect it with the most general of laws until I emerged with the horrible conclusion that what had happened was justified— that it was included in the universal schedule of events in a way that enriched the world’s harmony. Thus I arrived finally at the atrocious consolation that what happened was not only justified but was also necessary and proper.

—the narrator, after a woman’s murder,
in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek , Chapter XXII (trans. Bien)

Alexis Zorba, the titular Greek, does not represent anything. He simply lives life and is life itself, in all its contradictions. He is Nietzsche’s Dionysus: sometimes cruel, sometimes drunken and wild, sometimes exorbitantly generous, self-sacrificing, and compassionate. Above all he is impulsive and unreflective; he becomes obsessed with pottery, and when he finds his finger gets in the way, he cuts it off, though it hurts him immensely. This is Schopenhauer’s “will” — street knowledge, or perhaps “embodied knowledge,” at least in its human form.

Ironically, over the course of this line of writers (Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kazantzakis), the place held by the senses shifts. For Kant, the senses represent a barrier to knowledge of the mind-independent “real thing.” But because Schopenhauer asserts that the “real thing” is the blind will of nature, which Nietzsche then modifies to be both more living and more aesthetic, for Kazantzakis, the senses represent “real life” as opposed to abstraction. For Kant, the senses shield reality, whereas his analytical method helps to uncover at least the preconditions for any knowledge. For Kazantzakis, the senses reveal reality directly, as opposed to abstract thought.

I suspect that Kazantzakis’ reading of Nietzsche probably led more-or-less directly to Zorba. In 1906, he wrote his JD thesis on “Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State” — of all things. To be able to write a law degree thesis on Nietzsche!

Kazantzakis’ 1946 novel is, in some ways, about as anti-feminist a book as it is possible to conceive, and many people in my book club found its sexism difficult to endure. In another way, however, its verve and dogmatism is the mirror image of Beauvoir’s 1949 Second Sex. Both books make statements about women, seemingly brooking no exceptions, that are difficult to imagine anyone making today. To put it in Neither/Nor terms, the past eighty years may represent a swing away from categorical thinking, towards a greater interest in the unique contents grouped beneath grand categories like “Woman.”

Fast and slow

For Zorba and Birth, a swift dive seemed suitable to their subject matter. Nietzsche was 27 when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy; Kazantzakis was 63 when he published Zorba, and despite its Nietzschean themes, Nietzsche himself would not have approved of the world-weariness that pervades it — even, somehow, the life-loving Zorba — in spite of its commitment to the embrace of life in all its beauty and ugliness.

For I approach deep problems such as I do cold baths: fast in, fast out. That this is no way to get to the depths, to get deep enough, is the superstition of those who fear water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §381, from Book V (1887; trans. Nauckhoff)

By contrast, I’m still working my way through Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, the book which so deeply influenced Nietzsche in his youth. In The Story of Philosophy (1926), Will Durant wrote that “Only Spinoza or Goethe could have saved [Nietzsche] from Schopenhauer” — and I agree.

I began reading WWR Volume I in June 2021, and Volume II in September 2021, meaning that I’ve been reading those two books side-by-side for the past three years. Volume II is a commentary on Volume I, written 26 years later, so this is perhaps less insane than it might at first seem.

Schopenhauer, in his prefatory material, begins by saying that his work contains only a single idea, that this work was the shortest way he could put it, and that — despite its a combined ~1,358 pages —a reader would be best served by reading it in its entirety two times, followed by “occasional repetition.”

It is self-evident that in such circumstances, in order that the thought expounded may be fathomed, no advice can be given other than to read the book twice, and to do so the first time with much patience.

— Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
vol. I, Preface to the First Edition (1818; trans. Payne)

Nietzsche’s introduction to his first book, The Birth of Tragedy was written 15 later. Michael Tanner calls it “a magnificent introduction.” Walter Kaufmann, too, was impressed:

So far from singing his own praises, the self-criticism leaves nothing to be desired in sharpness; perhaps no other great writer has ever dealt so harshly with one of his own works in a preface.

— Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950)

[The Birth of Tragedy] was Nietzsche’s first book. It is far from being his best book, but the “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” that Nietzsche placed at the beginning of the “new edition” of 1886 is among the finest things he ever wrote. Perhaps no other great writer has written a comparable preface to one of his own works. Certainly this self-criticism is far superior to most of the criticisms others have directed against The Birth of Tragedy.

— Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s Basic Writings (1967)

That Nietzsche stood by his own book despite all his own misgivings about his youthful exuberance (especially about Wagner as a new type of tragedian to match Sophocles and Aeschylus) is to live by his own principle, stated in Will to Power, Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo in different forms. To paraphrase: to regret anything is not respectable, because it leaves one’s past self in the lurch.

Not to perpetrate cowardice against one’s own acts! Not to leave them in the lurch afterward! The bite of conscience is indecent.

—Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Arrows and Epigrams,” §10 (trans. Kaufmann)

There’s something to be said for a swift and deep dive, as well as for remaining in the presence of another mind for years. But that’s a subject for another week.

An image from the famous ending of the film adaptation of Zorba the Greek (1964)