Author Archives: Larry Franz

Spinoza and Spinozism by Stuart Hampshire

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Baruch (aka Benedict, aka Benedictus) Spinoza was a truly great philosopher. Professor Hampshire’s introduction to Spinoza, first published in 1951, has been one of my favorite books since I first read it in the 1970s. So it was disappointing to read this collection of Hampshire’s writings on Spinoza and find it rather tedious, mainly due to the repetitive nature of the book’s three main sections.

Still, if you want to understand Spinoza, Hampshire’s Spinoza: An Introduction to His Philosophical Thought, the 1987 edition of which is included in this book, is an excellent place to start. 

Spinoza famously argued that there can only be one infinite substance. This is Deus sive Natura, God or Nature. There is nothing supernatural about God, since God and Nature are the same. This one substance has two attributes, so far as we know: thought and extension, or mind and matter. Everything that exists or occurs is represented in both of these attributes. When something happens in my body, it also happens in my mind, and vice versa (although sometimes unconsciously). The same rule applies to all other objects in the universe, e.g. both rocks and rabbits.

In addition, everything that happens is fully determined. If we had the mental capacity, we could infer everything about the universe from what happened before. Yet we human beings have moments of freedom, i.e. when we exercise our rationality, either in pursuits like mathematics or in understanding ourselves and the world around us.

Hampshire doesn’t accept everything Spinoza said, of course. But he does generally endorse Spinoza’s view of our “double aspect” and what it means to be free in a deterministic world. Unfortunately, it’s hard to understand what it means for a rock to have a mental aspect. Hampshire tries to explain this idea by suggesting that a rock’s thought-like aspect is its form: “they have a nature and form which can be described or represented. They are not a haphazard collection of atoms. They have their own distinctive unity.”

But I think Spinoza was closer to the truth regarding the “mental” aspect of people and other animals than he was about things like rocks or trees. We have both a form that can be represented and the ability to represent ourselves and other things. We have evolved and become aware (Hampshire doesn’t disagree, of course). Having a form and being able to represent something that has a form are quite different things, although perhaps that’s what Spinoza had in mind. A rock has something that can be represented by an idea. And we have ideas. So maybe we are just a bit higher on the evolutionary scale.

My Country, ‘Tis of Thee

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Sweet land of liberty?

The older I get, the less patriotic I feel. It was easier to love America when I knew less about it.

Take, for instance, those brave Texans, joined by Davy Crockett of all people, standing up to the evil General Santa Anna at the Alamo. I didn’t know until recently that Mexico had invited the Americans to settle in Texas, with the understanding that the American immigrants would become Catholics, learn Spanish, obey Mexican law and presumably become Mexicans. For the most part, the American settlers ignored Mexican law, including the law against slavery. In little more than a decade, the Americans were fighting to take Texas from Mexico and, of course, make slavery legal. (Walt Disney and John Wayne didn’t tell that part of the story.)

Despite their defeat at the Alamo, the Texans prevailed and, after some controversy, joined the United States as a slave state. President James K. Polk immediately tried to expand Texas by purchasing land from Mexico. When Mexico refused to sell, Polk sent American troops into Mexico, igniting the Mexican-American War. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in the war, later referred to it as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation”. The Mexicans call it “the United States’ Invasion of Mexico”.

It’s clear that we haven’t lived up to our ideals as a nation. Obviously, nations never live up to their ideals completely, but our ideals are relatively high and our behavior is relatively low in too many cases.

So it isn’t surprising that there are lots of people with doubts about America these days. The person who wrote the article at the link below brings up Vietnam and Cambodia, Bush and Cheney, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Manning and Snowden, the NSA and our frequent outbreaks of paranoia.

He might have mentioned a whole bunch of other things. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world. We are the largest arms exporter in the world. Our leading politicians are for sale. People sometimes wait for hours to vote in poor neighborhoods, but not in rich ones. We’re the only developed country that doesn’t require paid vacations or maternity leave. And one of my favorites: our drug companies send drugs banned in America to other countries:

Dr. Maria Guadalupe Rodriguez tries vainly to convince parents that the costly American drugs they buy to fight their babies’ diarrhea are useless and often deadly.

Some of the drugs can paralyze a child’s intestines. Others can destroy a child’s ability to fight other infections. All fail to treat the worst enemy of a child with diarrhea: the dehydration that kills about 4 million children under 5 in underdeveloped countries every year, the World Health Organization says. All these infants need, WHO says, is an inexpensive mixture of sugar, salt and water.

Of thee I sing.

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One citizen’s angry appraisal of America: 

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/08/bin-laden-won-no-man-has-changed-america-more-for-the-worse.html#more

How drug companies profit by selling dangerous drugs overseas:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19910611&slug=1288354

Call For the Dead by John le Carré

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Call For the Dead was John le Carré’s first novel. He wrote it while still an employee of MI6, the British version of the CIA. It’s an entertaining mystery story about spies and murder that introduces the character of George Smiley, the “little fat man, rather gloomy,” who is the hero of Le Carre’s later novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

We also meet other characters who will return in later novels: the younger, suave Peter Guillam; the police officer Mendel; and the high-level civil servant Maston, later known as Lacon. Unfortunately, we don’t meet Smiley’s ex-wife Ann, although her words do appear a few times.

It’s a short novel, but quite good. My only problem was wondering how Smiley survived several blows to the head with a lead pipe, and why the police weren’t immediately summoned at a climactic moment. But if Smiley had died, or the police had been called, Call For the Dead would have been even shorter.

Liking What Dorothy Parker Said (or Didn’t)

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Amazon bought a site called Goodreads earlier this year. It’s a social network thing for readers that supposedly has 20 million members. I’m not one of them, but I noticed today that they have a selection of quotes from famous authors. And since it’s the internet, they allow you to click a button and say you like a particular quote.

Goodreads features more than 200 quotes from Dorothy Parker, the extremely witty woman who said, among other things:

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

“By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing.
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying.
Lady make note of this —
One of you is lying.”

“If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.” 

“Women and elephants never forget.”

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.”

“I hate writing, I love having written.”

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” 

“Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
a medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
and I am Marie of Romania.”

Yet the most popular Dorothy Parker quote on Goodreads, by a very, very large margin, is this lame observation:

“The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.”

Which isn’t even true: 

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Postscript:  According to a comment from Mr. T. Pedersen, the most-liked quote isn’t something Dorothy Parker actually wrote. Which, assuming he’s right, is to her credit.

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/24956.Dorothy_Parker

https://www.facebook.com/NewYorkerCartoons

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

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I browsed through Lolita when I was much younger, looking for the good parts. I was seriously disappointed. When I was older, I started it a few times but very quickly lost interest. Now I’ve finally read what many consider to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, maybe even the best.

For the most part, I wasn’t that impressed. Most of the novel details Humbert’s obsessive fascination with his young step-daughter. Nabokov engages in lots of entertaining word-play and makes fun of the American cultural scene, but it’s claustrophobic being locked up in Humbert’s fevered brain. Lolita’s body is present, but as a character she is pretty much a cipher.

That’s part of Nabokov’s purpose, of course. At the end of the novel, Humbert admits to himself that he’s stolen her childhood. He hasn’t allowed her to be a person. Lolita (the character) finally emerges when Humbert meets her a few years later, after she’s run away and started her own life. That’s when Lolita (the novel) at last delivers some emotional impact. It’s terribly sad to meet someone you still love who doesn’t love you — and in this case never did, for good reason.

Postscript:  Coincidentally, I just came upon an article about Nabokov, in which the author suggests that Humbert’s expression of guilt regarding Lolita’s stolen childhood is merely a device to gain the reader’s sympathy (Lolita is supposedly written by Humbert as a confession after he’s arrested). That could be, but I found his words convincing as a reaction to the sadness of meeting Lolita again and the memories it evoked.