The Luzhin Defense 
by 

Vladimir Nabokov, 

 

Michael Scammell (Translator), 

 

Владимир Набоков

 

It’s Never Too Late for a Happy Childhood

A boy who doesn’t want to grow up; a mother who loses interest in him as he does; a father who writes an idealised version of the boy’s life in which he doesn’t; and an agent who values only his client’s youthfulness: clearly not the best conditions for psychic maturation; but hardly signs of abuse.

The boy finds his solace and calling in the game of chess: “everything apart from chess was an enchanting dream... Real life, chess life, was orderly, clear cut, and rich in adventure.” In this life he was safe and secure as well as internationally famous.

The death of the boy’s father, in some sense a sign of forced adulthood, is resisted. The boy won’t attend the funeral. Instead he falls in love, with a woman who possesses that 

“mysterious ability in her soul to apprehend in life only that which had attracted and tormented her in childhood... to find constantly an intolerable and tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy...”

A perfect match, therefore: she a compulsive caretaker; he the eternal child. Whether either or both is psychotic or merely neurotic when they meet is an open question.

What could possibly go wrong?

Marriage brings with it a new adult provider, the father-in-law, and a new tender carer in his wife. But it also brings something unfortunate, the recognition of the “full horror of the abysmal depths of chess.” 

He has a breakdown. His wife and his doctor begin to explore his “dark period of spiritual blindness,” that is, his childhood. But it is clear to the reader that his condition is not the result of childhood trauma. Rather it is his desire to remain in a re-created childhood, free from the cares and sufferings of life outside of chess, and his fear of being removed from it, that is the cause of his distress.

Part of his therapy is complete isolation from chess. The wife knows it was necessary to find “some other interesting game.” But socialising, travel, typing, water-colouring can’t fill the chess-shaped hole in his soul. The result, of course, is that his highly functional life playing chess becomes a psychotic disaster in which he can no longer distinguish his life from the game that gave it meaning and coherence. 

It’s often possible to detect who’s being helped through analysis by the haunted look in their eyes. Thank you Dr. Freud.

 

Chess Story 
by 

Stefan Zweig

 

We Are Never Alone

With astounding concision in a short story about chess, Zweig outlines a profound psychological theory: that a human being’s greatest resource - the ability to reflect upon himself and his actions - is also his greatest vulnerability. 

Experience alone, without the capacity to reflect upon it, provides rigid rules for responding to situations which never quite repeat themselves. Reflective ability creates the ability to cope with entirely novel conditions through the power to re-shape the rules, to imagine alternative experiences. By standing, as it were, outside ourselves, we are able to create a context for ourselves, and consequently meaning.

On the other hand this reflective ability implies a “self fragmentation into the white ego and the black ego” and the potential for an “induced schizophrenia” or, more generally, for debilitating mental illness. Pushed to an extreme of sensual deprivation, Zweig suggests, we may be able to save ourselves from insanity through imagination. But this route to salvation is dangerously close to a different kind of insanity. We are tempted to move from an absence of meaning to an obsessive singular meaning which dominates the self that creates it.

The implication of course is that neuroses are purposeful, even heroic responses to difficult circumstances. Having used these neuroses successfully, they threaten to become habitual. And it is at that point we need some sort of friendly helping hand to avoid disaster. Not quite Freudian therefore, but very Viennese.

Postscript: An interesting recent philosophical piece on the same general idea may be found in Sloman and Fernbach’s The Knowledge Illusion: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Beware the New Scholasticism

The Machine Stops, written in 1909, is certainly a remarkably prescient tale of technological development. Like a proto-Cryptonomicon, it introduces ideas that we can now identify with the internet, the iPad, and even the 3-D production of goods, including food, from information. But its lasting value isn't about technology; it's about the mistakes we make when we start to think in a particular way. The biggest mistake is that of what we have come to call fake news.

Fake news is nothing new. But it is not merely unsubstantiated rumour. Fake news is that which confirms our existing views about the world. It consists of facts which cannot be gainsaid because no other facts are sufficient to displace the views we have already committed to. And it exists historically most markedly in societies in which established power is threatened.

There is an historical epoch that was in fact dominated by fake news, the Middle Ages. This was the era of Scholasticism, a mode of thinking that prided itself in summarising the implications of what was already known about the world and making sure nothing else, particularly if it disturbed established views, could be known.

In this, Scholasticism served the establishment of the Christian Church. Revelation, according to church doctrine, had been completed at the death and resurrection of Christ. This was the ultimate knowledge available to humanity. Nothing more was necessary. Further factual information or experience was at best superfluous and at worst distracted from the import of doctrine, which might be extended by inference but never altered.

Forster's fictional world is one of technological Scholasticism. It is a world of "undenominational Mechanism." New experiences are considered not only unnecessary but positively harmful to this new religion. Vashti, the protagonist, " is seized with the terrors of direct experience." She and her fellow-travellers on long distance air ships refuse even to look out at the Himalayas since the sight "gives them no ideas." In good scholastic tradition, the only valid ideas are those that can be inferred from existing knowledge:

"First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element -direct observation."

Our modern information technology is the vehicle for just this tenth-hand news. And the effects are similar to those that affected Forster's dystopia as well as the latter Middle Ages. We have experienced the same growing tensions between the governed and their governors; the same rise in extremist views and violent clashes among those who have adopted them, and the same yearning in many parts for the good old days of permanent, unchanging truth about the world.

I suggest as a rule of thumb: any news that claims historical continuity, from any quarter whatsoever, is probably fake. Conservative politicians call it ‘family values’; the Catholic Church calls it ‘tradition’; Protestants call it the ‘fundamentals’; scientists call it ‘established theory’; Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue call it ‘improvement’; anyone over 60 calls it ‘yesterday’. All fake and all directed toward the maintenance of power. As Forster says, fake news is undenomenational.

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The Metaphysical Club 
by 

Louis Menand

 

Denying the Privilege and Presumption of Power

Philosophy is, more often than it likes to admit, a response to traumatic political events. It is therefore frequently less about the concepts it makes explicit - knowledge, truth, correct action - than it is about dealing with the lingering consequences of profound social upset. The Metaphysical Club documents this thesis in its analysis of the roots of American Pragmatism.

Few might recognise today that the various schools of American Pragmatism associated with philosophers from C. S. Peirce in the 19th century to Richard Rorty in the 21st century have their origins in a specific national tragedy, the American Civil War. The intention of the first ‘pragmaticists’ (as Peirce called them) was to release the world from the doctrinaire use of reason that they perceived led to that conflict. 

Often confused with ‘vulgar relativity,’ Pragmatism is really a recognition that none of us actually knows what constitutes reason. The criteria of right thinking change about as frequently as what is thought. The contribution of pragmatic philosophy has been to establish truth as a necessary ideal but error as an equally necessary condition of inquiry. The essential lesson is one of humility rather than scepticism.

As the pragmatist philosopher Edgar Singer quipped in the 1930’s, “A fact is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.” This maxim is useful to keep in mind when dealing with various Trumpian attacks on science and the media as well as the fake news that has become routine on social media. 

All knowledge is incomplete and defective. This is a consequence of human finitude. Nevertheless, some claims to knowledge are better than other claims. Distinguishing between what constitutes approaches to the truth and intellectual dead ends is what Pragmatism seeks to accomplish - mainly to help us stop killing each other.

Pragmatism therefore implies a liberalism of thought that denies privileged or preferred modes of thinking. At the same time it seeks to reconcile contrary modes of thinking in the ‘larger truth.’ Its ethical virtues are respect for the intentions of others, confidence that there is indeed a larger truth to be had, and the patience to persist in the search. These are commonly called by their classical names of Faith, Hope, and Charity.

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Real Spoils of War

In his Being There, Kosinski meditated on the consequences of being socialised entirely through television. The Painted Bird considers how a child might be socialised (if that doesn’t stretch the meaning of the word beyond its limits) to the chaos of war and the morally-deprived society in which it takes place. It’s not pretty.

(view spoiler)[The unnamed protagonist loses contact with his parents at age six, and isn’t reunited with them until after he turns twelve. During their separation, the boy is subject to the cruelty of the peasant society of rural Poland with its superstitious explanations of all natural phenomena, including the boy’s dark hair which makes him anathema as either a Gypsy or a Jew. He is also from time to time subject to equivalent cruelty by the invading German Army, not because he is either a Gypsy or a Jew but because he is an orphan with no obvious productive contribution to military efficiency.

After a period of understandable confusion, the boy tries desperately to make sense of his new reality. His first attempts involve treating his situation in terms of some rational standard: if he works hard, keeps his mouth shut, and obeys, he reckons he should be safe. Of course, he isn’t. Cruelty increases without apparent cause or reason.

Running away, the boy learns how to survive alone in a forest wilderness. But his isolation makes him vulnerable to capture by either the peasants or the Germans. Without communal protection he becomes doomed to a life of excruciating slavery.

He then discovers what he thinks is both community and an explanation of his plight in the Christian religion. Prayer, he believes, is the answer to his suffering. If he can build enough credit with God, he will be delivered from injustice.

But pray as he might nothing improves. In fact he is subject to extreme sexual abuse. He concludes not only that there is inherent, possibly irresistible, evil in the world but that the odds apparently favour those who side decisively with the Demon who embodies evil. This Manichaean turn may be distasteful but it appears the only way to achieve justice for his tormentors. Captured by evil, he becomes mute.

His next epiphany occurs with the defeat of the Germans by the Soviets. He is taken in, cared for, and politically indoctrinated by soldiers of the Red Army. He sees what power is meant to be: protection of the weaker by the stronger. The fact that the reader may know of a dissonance between theory and practice in Soviet society is irrelevant to the boy’s experience. He perceives this new form of power as salvation.

But salvation is only temporary. Placed in an orphanage with all the other mutilated and mentally damaged children of war, new skills of survival are required. Justice, in particular, cannot be left to social institutions, but must be seen to personally and proportionately to the offences involved. He becomes a street kid, a child of the night, a friend to low lifes and misfits. And he is comfortable.

Until his parents appear. Suffering a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, the boy considers his estranged parents as an inconvenient constraint on his freedom and potential. His fantasies and grandiose dreams of success are threatened by parental supervision. His peace is shattered by the existence of an annoying younger step-brother. He is fundamentally unfit for family life.

The rediscovery of his voice on the ski slopes of Switzerland is a rather ambiguous conclusion that the boy doesn’t comment upon. It’s unclear whether Kosinski is suggesting some sort of post-traumatic recovery or merely an explanation for how the first-person story is told at all. It is nevertheless clear that his life will never be normal in any sense of the word. (hide spoiler)]

Postscript

This article appeared in my 'feed' several days after I finished reading Kosinski. It is a re-interpretation of the Book of Job that is remarkably congruent with the thrust of Kosinski's narrative.
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articl...

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Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula: Cures Many Mathematical Ills by Paul J. Nahin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Better than Prozac

Euler’s formula is arguably the most beautiful construction in mathematics. It shows how, with unparalleled elegance, five incommensurables universes of numbers are related to one another. Nahin makes the argument wonderfully and shows how the identity’s simple beauty is just as much use as ornament, solving a variety of mathematical problems in novel ways. Although not directed toward mathematicians, the book does require some competence in trigonometry, calculus, and elementary numerical analysis, probably obtained through study in engineering or physics. If you can handle it, I think you’ll find it comforting just how consistent, coherent and stable mathematics can be in a rapidly changing world.

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Diary of a Yuppie by Louis Auchincloss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Suicide Generation

Much better social commentary than literature, Auchincloss’s Diary of a Yuppie, marks an inflexion point in American culture, a very specific period when the idea of duty gave way without a fight to the necessity of ambition. The transition took place precisely when my generation of baby-boomers took control of the world. Once duty had been dumped, ambition has been biting itself in the backside on a recurrent schedule. As one of Auchincloss’s characters puts it, “You have to be born after WWII to be a real skunk.”

Auchincloss’s literary career was largely devoted to documenting how my generation took over from his and how we achieved a transformation which may just be suicidal. The only rule of the age of ambition is “break the rules, pay the penalty, and get back in the game.”

We were educated on someone else’s dime. We found employment easily and progressed just as easily in the corporate hierarchy. We shared with our hippie cohorts the overwhelming desire to escape from “infinite middle-classitude.”

We were the new meritocracy. Those without sufficient ambition, or ability, weren’t our concern. The world was changing; we were the ones destined to change it. We had a duty to ourselves, our families, our countries to succeed. Being the best meant doing what had to be done no matter how distasteful or personally corrupting.

Diary’s protagonist, Robert Service (the irony is clearly intentional), is an upper middle-class New York corporate lawyer. Auchincloss could write authoritatively about such men because he was one of them. But Service is also “representative of a generation” both as an example of the transition taking place and as a motive force in its execution.

Service is educated but banal. He can cite the classics but they have no meaning except as grease to social wheels. He is the embodiment of the social philosophy of Ayn Rand, the civil religion of the Prosperity Gospel, the spiritual narcissism of Erhard Seminar Training and the thinly veiled racism of late twentieth century Republicanism.

Forty years later it is possible to see where this Ambitious Everyman was headed: the North Korean missile crisis and the Appalachian opioid crisis; the racism of ISIS and the racism of Ferguson; treasonous Nixon becoming the treasonous Trump. We have systematically created a more horrible world than the one we inherited through our mindless ambition.

My grandson, an English Public School boy, was asked several years ago what he wanted to be when he grew up. Without hesitation he responded “Retired.” I felt elation at the implication that he has seen the real cause of our distress, that arrogant presumption of virtue which we call ambition. I interpret him as hoping for ethical survival as a possible alternative.

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When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Doctor of Despair

The fin de siecle Viennese satirist, Karl Kraus, took a dim view of the emerging field of psychiatry: “Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.” And, somewhat surprisingly, this is the main theme of this novel by an eminent psychotherapist. Psychiatry is indeed a field of Byzantine relationships. Perhaps that is Yalom’s point.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Josef Breuer never really met; but Yalom puts them in an intense relationship of mutual therapy, each believing that the other is the patient and he the therapist. Breuer, Freud’s mentor and the discoverer of the psychoanalytic ‘talking cure’, is acutely depressed; Nietzsche, the as yet unknown philosopher, suffers from debilitating migraines.

Nietzsche seeks to teach Breuer about ‘freedom’ by which he means a sort of resignation to one’s fate. Breuer sees his task as revealing Nietzsche’s emotional reality to himself. Neither succeeds. But in their failures they accomplish remarkable psychological things with themselves by trying to help the other. Breuer frees himself from his obsession with a patient and Nietzsche learns how to reduce the severity of his migraines.

It appears, then, that Karl Kraus was on to something important as far as Yalom is concerned. Kraus summarised the situation thus: “My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.” Psychoanalysis is Byzantine indeed. Does anyone really understand its mechanism and effects? Yalom seems to doubt it.

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The Ship by C.S. Forester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Cockney Interest in Disaster and Death

Published in the middle of WWII, The Ship is simultaneously an adventure, a philosophy of naval warfare and a statement of a new world order packaged in a short novel. So, while entirely obsolete as topical fiction, it is nevertheless a significant literary document.

There are only a few ways by which to fictionalise military experience. One, used by Forester so successfully in his Hornblower books, is to follow the career of an individual through personal conflict and trials of battle. Another, far more risky and the technique used in The Ship, is to narrate the interactions among men while they work out these interactions during a single engagement. Risky because if the author isn't skilful enough, the result is a sort of stilted psycho-drama without inherent narrative drive or interest.

Forester, of course, is more than skilled enough to pull it off. And he uses this interactive technique to make some essential points about the unique character of naval warfare, at least as far as such warfare used to be carried out. Primary is the fact that while in ground or air combat individual error is regrettable and damaging, at sea the same magnitude of error is most often disastrous. Any failure in the long chain of events carried out in a ship's organisation - from the cooks on the mess deck, to the oiler exiled to the remote shaft alley - means catastrophic failure of the whole not just a portion of the crew.

The mundane details of shipboard life give texture to Forester's depiction of battle. His constant theme is the extreme vulnerability of the ship, and not only from internal error. "The ship was an eggshell," he says, "armed with sledgehammers, and her mission in life was to give without receiving." To be part of the ship is to share its necessary fragility, and to silently accept it. This is the peculiar courage of sailors that is captured in the Nelsonian battle grace for officers as they stood ramrod still awaiting a broadside: “For what we are about to receive let us be truly thankful.”

Sea power today means something different than it did in 1943. Forester knew that the old Royal Navy was disappearing along with the ancien regime of British society. But for that moment "Ships –ships and the men in them –were still deciding the fate of the world."

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We Were Soldiers Once... and Young: Ia Drang - The Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This Gives Life to Thee

No contentious politics, no military apologetics, no analysis of motives, or rationalizations of judgmental error, We Were Soldiers is a memorial to the soldiers of the Air Cavalry during their first battles in Vietnam. The book reports almost every step taken by the two battalions involved in the week-long battles of Ia Drang, mostly in the words of the soldiers - on both sides - who took those steps. It is a humbling and heartbreaking chronicle of comradeship, suffering and frequent violent death. Written without any conventional narrative and in direct journalistic prose, the book presents no message other than remembrance. Consequently I think it is impossible to read without feeling awe at the courage and devotion to each other shown by these men.

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