No comments about Suetonius (Classical Paperbacks Series).

5 comments about Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation.

1. This hatchet job is truly a scandal. The author has an ax to grind. Skip it.



2. A great sage once said, "All history's a lie" and this book only further enhances that point. Which is why I am recommending it.

   Kohler not only contends that Nietzsche was a homosexual, but an uber-sissy who was lowered to menial tasks of propaganda and undershorts buying for the heavy-handed Master Wagner. Drawing largely from the diaries and personal correspondence of three megalomaniacs, which we know are highly accurate accounts of objective reality and history, Kohler paints a picture of a menage a trois of ascetic bondage: Nietzsche to Cosima and the Maestro, Cosima to the Master, and Wagner himself to the libidinous gods of hedonism. To top this off, the Dionysian Nietzsche in his final stages of dementia and mustachio maximus, calls out to Cosima, his spiritual Ariadne and soul-bride to come save his tottering soul from the labryrinth of the Wagnerian oppression that continued even after their reknowned split. Thus proclaiming, "C-o-s-i-m-a, you are the only MAN for me." Well Kohler didn't say that, but in saying that Wagner was "a woman" in Nietzsche's eyes and that Nietzsche himself, the constant companion of man-worshippers and man-worship was feminine in affection and mannerisms towards his friendths[sic], we can deduce from Nietzsche's admiration for her as an intellectual equal(remember his MISOGYNY!), that she was the only masculine personality in the triumvirate and thus Nietzsche's love and his homosexuality are validated. Not to mention that Herr Wagner is a dead ringer for Redd Foxx!

   All facts and fictions aside, the book made me laugh quite a few times. Maybe the truth was lost somewhere in the translation from German to English but it didn't stop my enjoyment. Why let history and truth get in the way of that? I mean, Nietzschean lore has purported that the young man, while serving in the German calvary during a riding exercise had fallen from his saddle and was dangling upside down under the belly of the horse(Perhaps it was the same horse that he witnessed being flogged and this was what sparked his madness!) and said, "Oh Schopenhauer, where are you now?" Who's buying that but the ghost of Schopenhauer and me?




3. The author of _Zarathustra's secret_ takes us through the period encounter between Nietzsche and Wagner in a quite graphic tale of one of the first of the modern celebrity farces, that of Wagnerian ego and its hangers on. Although the account is well done, I should wonder if a clever cutpurse like Nietzsche was ever really subjugated and whether he didn't, despite an series of emotional shocks, achieve the net equivalent of going undercover as a Wagner disciple, to his profit or loss in unclear. For all the background music of the philosophic, more than musical, leitmotiv (Schopenhauer gave it away with fake hint, the 'will') this account of artistic overdrive twice over is a remarkable tale of psychological helplessness, in Wagner and Nietzsche. Anyway, worth reading.



4. NW is not the most academic of books in form, but readability and lack of footnotes do not make a book worthless. Köhler may not have enough evidence to convince the critical, but the material provided is well worth the read. Homosexuality/onanism/anti-semitism: these elements are simply not central to either individual (Wagner's anti-semitism may be the exception). Some of Köhler's conclusions may be questionable, but his observations are not what make the book. The content itself is very interesting, and the intelligent and familiar (with RW/FN) will come away with a great degree of insight. To anyone sincerely interested in either, it is requisite. Perhaps you will not agree with Köhler, so what? The book is simply worth the read. My opinions didn't change from the book, but I have a much richer picture of both men. (I am honesty surprised that anyone could find this book upsetting [see review below]. It's a fun little book, if you hate it, you really ought to relax a bit. Not for tyros: if you've only read a bit of FN or seen an opera, and you want a key to understanding either, forget it. But if you are deep into either, you skip it at your peril.



5. Once in a lifetime a book comes along ... that is so arm-wavingly silly that it's almost Pythonesque. This book, "Nietzsche and Wagner: a Study in Subjugation" is actually less reliable than Robert Gutman's or Marc Weiner's Wagner books, which were previously the record-holders. But Kohler beats them hollow. I'm sorry to say that this book has the scholarly merit of a UFO abduction memoir.

   Kohler doesn't even bother to try to substantiate his various untrue and silly claims. One of these claims is that Nietzsche was homosexual, for which Kohler (as several critics have pointed out) adduces no evidence at all. Maybe Kohler thinks that Nietzsche calling a book "Die Froeliche Wissenschaft" (The Gay Science) makes Nietzsche "gay" in the current sense. (The meaning of "gay" seems to be changing again, but that's another story.) But we have plenty of evidence of Nietzsche's heterosexuality and no evidence at all of same-sex desire or practice. Nietzsche was a misogynist, hostile and contemptuous towards women, also clearly afraid of them, but that doesn't make him homosexual. Kohler seems to think that claiming something is the same as making it so.

   Kohler also claims that after the Nietzsche-Wagner split Wagner conducted a relentless and vindictive campaign against Nietzsche on the grounds that he (Nietzsche) was homosexual. Again, Kohler doen't support this claim of a homophobic campaign by Wagner with any evidence. But then, how could he? There was no such campaign. Instead there was the famous letter from Wagner to Nietzsche's doctor, expressing concern for the health of "our young friend N."and suggesting that Nietzsche's nervous problems might be caused by excessive masturbation.

   Wagner's letter is splendidly dotty, but it also brings Kohler's claims crashing to the ground. (1) Masturbation is not the same thing as homosexuality. Wagner did not think Nietzsche was homosexual; instead, prescient in so many things, Wagner was the first major thinker to call Nietzsche a wanker (just kidding, Nietzsche fans). (2) A kindly meant, if eccentric, letter to Nietzsche's doctor is not quite the same thing as persecution. It's clear from Cosima Wagner's Diaries that Wagner's private reaction to the split with Nietzsche was regret, a wish to have the breach healed, and an undoubtedly patronising pity for "that poor young man" Nietzsche. These are not the sort of feelings that lead to persecution or a campaign of vilification, as Kohler claims.

   As well, Wagner's actual attitude to homosexuals (there were no gays in the 19th Century) is suggested in an earlier letter to a homosexual friend. Wagner suggests that his friend "try to cut down a little, on the pederasty"... The attitude is one of amused tolerance, which won't do now, but it was progressive and liberal by the standards of his time. Wagner wasn't a homophobe.

   In fact Wagner didn't respond in public to Nietzsche's repeated attacks (except once, a very indirect reference in one of his essays, without mentioning Nietzsche's name); contra Kohler, the abuse was very much a one-way street, and not in the direction that Kohler suggests.

   Kohler also presents a Nietzsche who wrote antisemitic passages in his works during the alliance with Wagner, but who stopped after the split. This is simply and flagrantly untrue. The post-Wagner Nietzsche attacked antisemites, but he also continued to attack and insult Jews. There are many, many antisemitic passages in Nietzsche's work - Nietzsche fans, like Kohler and the reviewer from Kirkus Review quoted above, like to overlook Nietzsche's antisemitism, but antisemites find Nietzsche a useful supporter and resource. You'll find plenty of antisemitic quotes from Nietzsche on proud display on the Web's neo-Nazi sites, and the vast majority of these antisemitic passages were written AFTER the split with Wagner.

   And there's Nietzsche's attack on Wagner in which he claimed that Wagner had a Jewish father. There is irony, of course, in claiming an antisemite has Jewish parentage. But it reflects what Wagner himself seems to have believed, that the man who was almost certainly his real father, Ludwig Geyer, was Jewish. For this attack Nietzsche must have drawn on his private conversations with Wagner, in which Wagner poured out personal fears to a man he believed was his friend. The nastiness in Nietzsche's attack is in the betrayal of confidence, not in the claiming that Wagner had a Jewish parent.

   I mention this attack by Nietzsche, couched in antisemitic terms and involving personal betrayal, because Kohler skips blithely over it. Imagine what he'd said if it had been the other way round; Wagner attacking Nietzsche in antisemitic terms while betraying an intimate confidence. But in fact there are suspiciously few quotes of any kind from Nietzsche in Kohler's book. Given the book's profound ignorance of the details of Nietzsche's or Wagner's life and philosophies, I suspect this is not so much because Kohler wants to keep it simple, but because he is not particularly familiar with his subjects' work. Given the sort of book he's written, he didn't need to be.

   By the way, an earlier book by Kohler, that's only just been translated into English, "Wagner's Hitler", is now available. Friends who've read the German edition tell me that it's even more fanciful, nonsensical, dishonest and incoherent than this book. I'll look for it in a remainder bin.

   Laon

2 comments about Ludwig Wittgenstein (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives).

1. 
   When thinking about Wittgenstein, I often recall the comment attributed to Cambridge Philosophy professor C.D. Broad (who did not understand nor like him). `Not offering the chair of philosophy to Wittgenstein would be like not offering the chair of physics to Einstein!" I think of him as the Einstein of intuitive psychology. Though born ten years later, he was likewise hatching ideas about the nature of reality at nearly the same time and in the same part of the world and like Einstein nearly died in WW1. Now suppose Einstein was a suicidal homosexual recluse with a difficult personality who published only one early version of his ideas that were confused and often mistaken, but became world famous; completely changed his ideas but for the next 30 years published nothing more, and knowledge of his new work in mostly garbled form diffused slowly from occasional lectures and students notes; that he died in 1951 leaving behind over 20,000 pages of mostly handwritten scribblings in German, composed of sentences or short paragraphs with, often, no clear relationship to sentences before or after; that these were cut and pasted from other notebooks written years earlier with notes in the margins, underlinings and crossed out words so that many sentences have multiple variants; that his literary executives cut this indigestible mass into pieces, leaving out what they wished and struggling with the monstrous task of capturing the correct meaning of sentences which were conveying utterly novel views of how the universe works and that they then published this material with agonizing slowness (not finished after half a century) with prefaces that contained no real explanation of what it was about; that he became as much notorious as famous due to many statements that all previous physics was a mistake and even nonsense and that virtually nobody understood his work, in spite of hundreds of books and tens of thousands of papers discussing it; that many physicists knew only his early work in which he had made a definitive summation of Newtonian physics stated in such extremely abstract and condensed form that it was impossible to decide what was being said; that he was then virtually forgotten and that most books and articles on the nature of the world and the diverse topics of modern physics had only passing and usually erroneous references to him and that many omitted him entirely; that to this day, half a century after his death, there were only a handful of people who really grasped the monumental consequences of what he had done. This, I claim, is precisely the situation with Wittgenstein.
   
   Over half a century after his death and after decades of relative neglect (considering he is viewed by some as the greatest natural psychologist of all time) Wittgenstein is again attracting considerable attention. Though there are hundreds of books dealing wholely or in large part with him, few have really grasped his remarkable advances in understanding behavior, so this fresh look is most welcome.
   
   Overall, it is first rate with accurate, sensitive and penetrating accounts of his life and thought in roughly chronological order, but, inevitably (ie, like everyone else) it fails, in my view, to place his work in proper context and gets some critical points wrong. It is not made clear that philosophy is armchair psychology and that W was a pioneer in what later became cognitive or evolutionary psychology. One would not surmise from this book that he laid out the foundations of the modern concept of intentionality (roughly, personality or higher order thought) which has been further advanced by many (most noteably in philosophy by John Searle in "The Construction of Social Reality" and "Rationality in Action").
   
   There is no clear explanation of how W defined the class of potential actions, which he called dispositions or inclinations, (now often called propositional attitudes), differentiating them from perceptions, memories and actions and showing how they lack truth value. He notes that W spent much of his time discussing the foundations of mathematics but fails to provide any explanation as to how this relates to his work on language and logic. In fact, as W came to realize, they are all names for groups of functions of our innate psychology with many differences and none are dependent on the others. It is not really made clear that all our behavior depends on the unquestionable axioms of our evolved psychology and thus differs totally from the testable empirical facts which they enable us to discover. It is not explained that W's frequent references to "grammar" and to "language games" refer to our innate psychology. All these failings are the norm in behavioral studies.
   
   Kanterian notes (p41) that in W's first talk on philosophy, given in 1912 at the age of 23, he is reported to have said that philosophy is the totality of all propositions that are taken as unprovable and basic in science. If one understands that "philosophy" is observational psychology, and that "propositions" are sentences which depend for intelligibility (truth) on the innate axioms of our psychology, it appears that W understood the basic problem of philosophy (behavior) and its answer right from the beginning--a feat few have accomplished to this day. He again made this crystal clear in a letter to Russell quoted by Kanterian (p86) in which he stated that the point of TLP :
   
   "is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions -ie. by language-(and which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown (gezeigt) which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy. "
   
   Note also W's identification of thought with language and his rejection of the idea that there is, between language and thought, another entity such as "the language of thought", a point which he discussed directly and indirectly for the next 30 years but which still bedevils behavioral literature nearly a century later--another sad consequence of the oblivion to one of our greatest teachers.
   
   Kanterian describes the famous distinction in W's Tractatus between what can be said and what can only be shown but does not explain that one can understand this in terms of W's later denotation of the difference between our axiomatic innate psychology, which submits to no test (eg, this is my hand, I am reading this page etc), and the factual or empirical applications of this evolved axiomatic system (ie, our intentionality). Perhaps one should not fault Kanterian, since, to my knowledge, nobody else has noticed what I regard as this basic and essential interpretation of W's TLP either--though a few have noticed it in his later work. It is essential to understand this distinction because any description (following W's frequent injunction that we cannot EXPLAIN but only DESCRIBE our psychology) of animal behavior must do so in terms of evolution for the same reasons we must describe the genetics, physiology, anatomy and function of the heart in evolutionary terms. The alternative "blank slate" view that heart functioning is a matter of one's environment is just as preposterous for the brain.
   
   He does a good job (eg, pg 170-171) of describing (as have others, notably Hacker) W's transition from the confusions of TLP to the clarity of his later work, but (again in my view following universal practice) does not really grasp that W's ideas of the "atomic facts" and "crystalline logic" that formed the foundations of his TLP world view evolved into the notions of an innate axiomatic psychology that he explicated for the last 20 years of his life.
   
   He also notes (p80) that by discovering the innateness of "depth grammar" (ie, our inherited psychology that makes language (thought) possible), W anticipated Chomsky and others by decades. I noticed this some 40 years ago but I have never seen anyone else point it out, so it's hats off to Kanterian!
   
   With his penetrating understanding of our psychology, W was also prescient about larger issues such as the desireability of progress.
   
   "It isn't absurd... to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately by known; that there is nothing good or desireable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this in not how things are." ) (Kanterian p114 from W's Culture and Value).
   
   Kanterian quotes, without I think fully understanding its implications (again like everyone else so far as I know), another very fundamental discovery by W--our natural tendency to subsume all uses of a word or sentence under a single meaning rather than recognizing that eg, "space" is a complex family of uses or concepts (language games as W liked to call them) with quite different applications (meanings) in our life (our intentional psychology).
   
   He notes that W described thinking and other dispositions or inclinations (W's terms)-- (ie, judging, feeling, remembering, believing etc)-- as behaviors and not as mental activities but I don't see that he really makes it clear that another pioneering discovery of W's was that dispositions describe public actions and cannot be mental phenomena for the same reason that he so famously rejected the possibility of a private language.
   
   The probable evolutionary explanation for a route to such usage of dispostion words seems to me to be that several hundred thousand years ago (give or take) when we evolved the ability to vocalize events, objects or actions (ie, when an animal as agent was involved), sentences first substituted for them (get spear, hunt deer) and only later became usable in a dispositional or displaced manner (I want you to get the spear, I think we will hunt deer soon). Again, to my knowledge, W was the first to point this out in any detail with such examples as how pain language functions (see p 182).
   
   Kanterian describes (p174) how W (so famously and notoriously ) felt he had put an end to philosophy as it was understood and how most philosophers reject this view (or more commonly simply ignore it if they are aware of it at all), but his comments that this narrows the range of what we can know by abstract thought and that metaphysical questions make no sense, seem to me to completely miss the point. I think W just called our attention to the fact that "knowing" is another set of games or psychological functions which we can only accept as they are. Much (we might say ALL) of W's work can be seen as describing how "knowing" works and his last writings published as "On Certainty" regarded as the crowning achievement of his life (and of 20th century philosophy/psychology). Metaphysical questions have no traction because questioning the axioms of our psychology lacks a use in our life (this is not "really" my hand, maybe 2+2=4 is not "really" true, perhaps you are not reading this page, etc). Abstract thought (games, music, math, literature, science) is limitless but entirely dependent on the axioms.
   
   Kanterian is one of the rare persons who gets it correct (p185) that W rejects a "language of thought" for the same reason he rejects private languages and dispositions such as thinking, believing etc as mental processes(p 180-183); namely that this would make it possible to make systematic mistakes in our "translations" of thoughts to actions (eg, thinking "I want that apple" to saying "I want that apple") which is absurd. A translation could always be wrong and what test could tell us? We lack the criteria for correctness. We would then need some test for showing what we really thought! I might say "I want the apple" or " I don't want the apple" and what connects that to my thought--even for me? The words are my thoughts (approximately) which are descriptions of acts.
   
   Kanterian also mentions that, in spite of the fact that a large percentage of W's writing concerned the philosophy (ie psychology) of mathematics, very little attention is paid to his work by most of those writing on the foundations of math over the last 50 years. Unfortunately he fails to tell us why. One reason is the nearly universal failure to understand what W has done as a result of his originality, style, failure to publish and premature death. Another is that it took so long to properly gather, translate and edit the 20,000 some pages of his nachlass that several generations have grown up without access to the full body of his work. Even to this day some of the German text remains untranslated and one of his most famous and largest works--The Big Typescript--was only translated and published in 2005. In addition, many who were regarded as experts on the subject of math and logic (eg Dummett, Kreisel, Chihara, Godel) totally failed to understand him and much of the writing by others on the foundations of math is not about its psychological foundations at all (of which they are generally oblivious) but about the details of how math is done. The few who have made progress in understanding his mathematical comments have been largely ignored (eg, Gefwert, Shanker) or have published so recently that their work has not had time to diffuse (eg, Rodych, Floyd). Those interested will find further comments and references in my other reviews. I claim that W's work on this is continuous with the rest of his corpus and overall, the most original and stimulating ever done.
   
   He repeatedly and correctly notes (eg, p176) that the core of W's work is the nature of language but (again the universal failing) does not make it clear that language is for humans (as opposed to animals) almost coextensive with thought (public behavior as W insisted) and thus with our evolved psychology. Like most people, philosophers or not, Kanterian has not followed W and taken the final step towards understanding and describing behavior from an evolutionary standpoint, the only viewpoint that makes sense of it, or indeed of anything.



2. Considering there has been two essential biographies written on Wittgenstein, that is Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990) by Ray Monk, and Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's Life, 1889-1921 (1988) by Brian McGuinness, both award winning texts, another biography of the famous philosopher seemed to me to be a redundant exercise. What new information has come to light regarding the great philosopher and what possibly could be added to what has already been expertly covered in the above said texts?
   
   Edward Kanterian has done something essential and quite extraordinary with this new biography, and that is he focuses on Wittgenstein's religious sensibilities, revealing the philosopher's strong convictions to keep his spiritual concerns separate from his philosophy. The author also spotlights Wittgenstein's four love relationships, their intenseness, their joy and the deep suffering the man experienced when they ended, two of which, tragically.
   
   The reader should also consider that Wittgenstein has become an industry for academics and journalists comprising to date over 10,000 secondary sources (including a feature film) on the man's work and his life. Kanterian also examines this phenomenon and proposes possible reasons for this plethora of interpretation and interest for Wittgenstein and his work.
   
   Wittgenstein's first true relationship and closest personal friend in the early years before WW1 was the young David Pinsent. Pinsent was a brilliant undergraduate in mathematics, (and a descendant of the famous 18th century philosopher, David Hume) who assisted Wittgenstein in certain experiments. He was also the philosopher's travel companion: very sensitive and a good listener, tragically the boy died in an aeroplane accident in 1918.
   
   Frances Skinner was more than likely the most important person in Wittgenstein's life. He was a mathematician of great potential, a student at Cambridge to become a Wittgenstein "disciple". Wittgenstein told the boy to drop mathematics' and academic life and work with his hands. He followed this advice against the wishes of his parents and other friends. Unfortunately after some years of working and living together, Wittgenstein required distance from the relationship however received word that his beloved Frances died of poliomyelitis in October 1941. Wittgenstein never truly recovered from this loss.
   
   The third important relationship was with an Austrian high society woman by the name of Marguerite Respinger. There is a diary entry included in this book that really expresses Wittgenstein's feeling for her. Of course they never married but remained good friends.
   
   Ben Richards was the fourth intense relationship and Wittgenstein's last. Richards was a strikingly handsome lad, studying medicine at Cambridge. He is described as kind, sensitive and considerate. Wittgenstein felt a selfless love for Richards and when the boy (40 years Wittgenstein's junior) moved on from the relationship, Wittgenstein's letters and diary entries reveal a man with a broken heart - all very moving.
   
   What these diary entries about his relationships reveal is a man capable of a deep kind of love, a joy and suffering simultaneously felt, as only a deep love can create. What I found extraordinary was that Wittgenstein was so cerebral, a master of logic, an accomplished engineer and architect, however was capable of such intense feeling in his relationships and music. I found Kanterian's book to reveal this aspect of the philosopher more so than the other biographies.
   
   To Kanterian's great credit, his expositions on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations are more than likely the most clearly explained interpretations I've ever encountered, making these notoriously difficult works, clear and comprehensible - a pure joy to read.
   
   Ludwig Wittgenstein by Edward Kanterian as part of the Critical Lives Series is a notable contribution to the life and works of the famous philosopher and a text useful for someone thinking about embarking on the Wittgenstein Quest.
   
   Highly recommended.

No comments about The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau Volume 1 (Large Print).

No comments about The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau Volume 3 (Large Print).

No comments about The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau Volume 2 (Large Print).

No comments about Albert Schweitzer: Philosopher, Theologian, Musician and Doctor.

No comments about The Essential Thomas Paine (Dover Books on Americana).

2 comments about Daniel Dennett: Reconciling Science and Our Self-Conception (Key Contemporary Thinkers).

1. Elton distills and places in context common currents running throughout Dennett's work sympathetically and accurately - but not uncritically - for those who haven't encountered all the various pieces that compose Dennett's approach. Elton avoids getting mired in the confusing controversies by abstaining from distracting attempts to tie off loose ends, but he does represent the basic thread of objections to Dennett's work as well as canvass Dennett's general responses, occasionally indulging in well-marked hypothetical extensions of Dennett's approach where Dennett has refrained from responding explicitly. The result is a fairly concise narrative containing insights and syntheses of interest even to those who have spent a great deal of time on Dennett's thought, while remaining a useful and reliable antidote to the most common confusions for those who have not.



2. Matthew Elton provides an excellent account of Dennett's work. The book goes beyond being an introduction. In his presentation of Dennett's view on intentionality and consciousness, Elton systematizes were Dennett is eclectic, points out flaws in arguments and at times improves on them (no, not on the flaws).

   I'm less enthusiastic about his appraisal of Dennett on Darwin and on free will and responsibility. Still Elton's account is sound and fair.

   For more specialized treatments of Dennett's philosophical perspective, there are collections by Bo Dahlbom and (two) by Andrew Brook and Don Ross et al.

No comments about Masochism: The Mystery of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.