Tracking A. E. Kroeger

(a.) The activity independent of the form, and the activity independent of the content of the reciprocity, are mutually to determine each other.
That activity which is to determine the form of the reciprocity, or the reciprocity as such, but is to be absolutely independent of it, is a going over from one of the links of the reciprocity to the other.

That activity which determines the content of the reciprocity is an activity which posits that into the links whereby it is made possible to go from the one to the other.

The latter activity gives the X which is in both links, and can be contained only in both, but not in one of them merely ; and which makes it impossible to remain content with the positing of the one link, but forces us to posit at the same time the other link, because it shows up the incompleteness of the one without the other. This X is that to which the unity of consciousness clings, and must cling if no hiatus is to arise in it ; it is, as it were, the conductor of consciousness.

The former activity is consciousness itself, in so far as it floats over the interchanging links while clinging to X, and in so far as it is a unit; although it changes its objects, these links, and necessarily, must change them if it is to be a unit.

The former determines the latter signifies, the going from the one link to the other is the ground of the content of the reciprocity ; the latter determines the former signifies, the content of the reciprocal links is the ground of the going from the one to the other as act. Both mutually determine each other signifies, therefore : by positing the mere going over, you posit in each link that which makes this going over possible, and by positing them as reciprocal links you immediately go from the one to the other. The going from one link to the other
becomes possible only by doing it ; and it is only possible in so far as it is actually done. It is an absolute act without any other ground. The ground of the going over from one link to the other lies in consciousness itself, not outside of it. Consciousness, because it is consciousness, must go from one link to the other, and would not be consciousness if it did not, because a hiatus would arise in it.
- J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. Adolph Ernst Kroeger (1868)

This book is brilliant because of how it resembles Chekhov's "Monologue on the Evils of Smoking." I don't mean Fichte's text--which is okay, if you're into that kind of thing--but rather the translation itself, which was the only English version of this (collection of) texts until 1970. This is a translation so terrifyingly bad that in 1899 G. E. Moore was moved to write of another of the translator's oeuvres that

It is difficult to imagine what can justify the publication of a book as this. So far as mere familiarity with German is concerned, Mr. Kroeger would, indeed, seem to be sufficiently equipped for the task he has undertaken; for it is not very often that he has totally mistaken the sense of any particular sentence. But his inaccuracy and unfaithfulness to his original are so gross as to render his translation absolutely useless, as a substitute for the German, to any serious student of philosophy. It may, indeed, be doubted whether a student, whose object was to learn German and philosophy together, might not get as much good as harm, by using this translation with the original...

Sentences without subjects! Random excisions and insertions! Backpatting footnotes signed trans! In short, reading Fichte in Kroeger's rendering makes the original's haze of positing and counterpositing look like a marvel of literary aesthetics.

Kroeger, the online Appleton's Cyclopedia tells us, was born in Schleswig in 1837--which means this abortion was produced when he was thirty-one years old. And then, testifying to the eternal treachery of print, the same encyclopedia blatantly lies to us: "[B]y translations of the works of Fichte, Kant, and Leibnitz. and by numerous essays in different periodicals, he largely contributed to a better understanding of German literature in this country, and increased the number of those that are interested in it." I suspect that Kroeger's insidious influence has in fact turned away more students of German literature than we will ever know. His indefatigable zeal for making his national culture unpopular would have done his namesake proud.

But why would I compare this work to Chekhov's? The latter uses a device wherein the lecture format of the monologue collapses in on itself and the speaker is suddenly found to be lecturing about his personal problems and his shrewish wife, and not smoking at all. This translation works the same way. What had been in Fichte's case merely philosophy becomes in Kroeger's a revelation of the Self, struggling in the prison house of language. Try as you might, you won't find a subject for those sentences, or, indeed, a coherent explanation of what exactly "the former determines the latter signifies." Language, here, is serving only as a placeholder for a meaning that one can look up elsewhere, perhaps in an analogue of Appleton's Cyclopedia; it is sufficient to skim Kroeger's text briefly to ascertain that one has not in fact purchased a volume of Schelling instead.

The philosophy isn't the important thing. What matters is that Kroeger is bringing to the unwashed Anglophone masses the beauty of the German language, as he makes clear in the introduction to another book, on the Minnesingers:

Perhaps it was the fact that the German language is an original tongue, and hence needed not to wait, like the English, Spanish, Italian, and French, for a thorough amalgamation, which made possible this earlier development of literature ... The two great national German epics—the Nijbelungen and the Kudrun — are perhaps as familiar as foreign poetry of any kind can ever hope to become to a public so clannish in its literary pursuits, as that which speaks the English language. But of the German lyrical poetry of those ages, and their narrative epics, little or nothing is known outside of Germany, and even there these most wonderful productions of German genius are by no means so widely known as they deserve to be.

Doubtless it is by bludgeoning them in this manner that the clannish audience is made to believe in the unparalleled originality of the German language (a bit of Mitteleuropa affectation which Kroeger's namesake would soon substantiate). It is hard for me not to identify with Kroeger's aspirations here, though. He wants to bring his native culture to bountiful communion with his adopted one, a task that is almost always thankless and nearly as often useless. But in the process, he ends up supporting his whole case on his own limited abilities as a translator and propagandist. Deficiencies in the work are felt all too painfully, and patched up with ridiculous emendations; the intended popularity of the text is placed above its own fidelity to itself; the corpus expands continuously until it is interrupted by death.

Which brings me back to Fichte. One of his central concerns is that his philosophy can only be appreciated by a certain kind of person. What kind of person? One who is invested in his freedom and sovereign individuality, i.e., who is likely in Fichte's camp to begin with. This, of course, raises the question of why the work is necessary in the first place--a question Fichte doesn't even try to really answer. It is the same with Kroeger. Only someone already devoted to German culture and thought can make anything of Kroeger's voluminous interventions. But then, what was the point?

Relativity

An analysis of the causes of improvement still leaves the modern student marvelling that so much was achieved. The attitude of contemporaries was different. Colquhoun, for instance, who was responsible for much of the more pessimistic opinion of his day, saw in poor relief, the hospitals, the charities of London, the absolute high-water mark of provision for misfortune. With all this, he asks, how is it possible that so much vice and misery should still exist? To-day the problem seems akin to that of the army and navy--how could men, recruited as were the British land and sea forces, not to speak of the corruption and bad administration which was rife, achieve such results? Part of the answer is probably the same in both cases. There had been a number of obscure reforms, whose cumulative effect was very great, which for the most part have been lost sight of in the more fundamental changes which took place later, and obscured by an increasing realisation of evils and a growing intolerance of hardships. One can hardly suppose, for instance, that the grievances which led to the Mutiny of the Nore were worse than those endured by the unfortunate seamen in the expedition to Cartagena, so vividly described by Smolett in Roderick Random. The improvements in medicine and sanitation had bettered conditions both in London and at sea. The expansion of trade and the many opportunities of rising in the world had their counterpart in the prize-money, of which all sailors had a chance. The advance still remains surprising and we are reminded of the strange way in which human nature still manages to be so much better than the world has any right to expect. We can but admire the people who responded so quickly to the beginnings of an improvement in their environment. Then, in spite of restrictions, in spite even of the press-gang and the clamp, the eighteenth-century Londoner had an intense sense of personal freedom, and of his share in the heritage of British liberty. And freedom being primarily a state of mind, we must recognize, in spite of Rousseau and Disraeli and other scoffers, the undoubted fact that this sense of personal liberty had a real importance in the social life of the time.
- M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925)

The purpose of George's classic book is twofold. She aims first to give a broad panorama of the titular subject matter: life in eighteenth-century London as a solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short pilgrimage through collapsing buildings and depraved poverty, punctuated only by the alluring charms of the tavern and the gin-shop. This quaint setting is then used to articulate her main point--that the supposed horrors wreaked upon England's green and pleasant land by the Industrial Revolution in fact paled in comparison to the ignominy of existence under the Georges. More than that: it was only because things had gotten so much better that they seemed so much worse. Once society had had a taste of reform, it began to want nothing else. (Revolutions, it is well-known, only happen on an upswing.)

The argument is compelling, but dangerous; indeed, it appears to prove too much. George, presumably, wants us to stop romanticizing pre-industrial urban life and focus on the concrete possibilities for reform that exist within any given moment in a society's history. More recently, but in the same spirit, Steven Pinker has exposed the seamy underbelly of the treacherous, murderous annals of the human race--an attempt to teach us that we've never had it so good. These ventures both rely on the premise that we are suffering from a lack of perspective on the past: because poverty and violence used to be so normal, the lack of emphasis placed on them by contemporaries has made them invisible to our eyes.

That's what we, morally speaking, should be learning. But if we are attentive, we learn something quite different. Reform and revolution have generated nothing but the fervent need for more progressive change, a desire that can never be satisfied, because smaller and smaller problems loom larger and larger in our eyes. (Nietzsche, Genealogy: "Compared with one night's pain endured by a hysterical bluestocking, all the suffering of all the animals that have been used to date for scientific experiments is as nothing.") So the expectation of "steady, unilinear upward progress" (as the phrase goes) dooms us to an existence of eternal suffering, a form of historical keeping up with the Joneses.

In the '50s, the anti-technocratic philosopher Jacques Ellul reviewed a pamphlet in which leading scientists described the inventions of the future in glowingly naive terms and trumpeted the great leaps humanity was to make by the year 2000. One of these inventions was a perfect narcotic that would yield happiness without side effects. Ellul objected, quite reasonably: if we have this pill, what's the point of having all the rest of that stuff? We begin to see the paradox. Well-being measured objectively is meaningless; well-being measured subjectively forces us to concede that eighteenth-century Londoners, living their noble-savage lives amidst grime and oppression, might well have been happier with their lot than we are. So we substitute other measures for well-being: income per capita, average life expectancy, infant mortality. But what good is living for a century if it is a century of feverish and unsatisfying upward mobility?

Of course, embracing eighteenth-century Londoners as a model will not solve the problem. They were, as Schiller would put it, "naive"; we are "sentimental." No matter how much we idealize their comparatively uncomplaining lives and low standards, we'll never be able to regain their sense of satisfaction. Only two alternatives remain. We could give up on happiness and even "standard of living" as meaningful criteria for evaluating human societies--or we could get to work on those magic pills. Until then, relative happiness and sentimentality will always go hand-in-hand.

A Daring Venture of Reason

Here it is permissible for the archaeologist of nature to derive from the surviving traces of its oldest revolutions, according to all its mechanism known or supposed by him, that great family of creatures (for so we must represent them if the said thoroughgoing relationship is to have any ground). He can suppose the bosom of mother earth, as she passed out of her chaotic state (like a great animal), to have given birth in the beginning to creatures of less purposive form, that these again gave birth to others which formed themselves with greater adaptation to their place of birth and their relations to each other; until this womb becoming torpid and ossified, limited its births to definite species not further modifiable, and the manifoldness remained as it was at the end of the operation of that fruitful formative power.— Only he must still in the end ascribe to this universal mother an organisation purposive in respect of all these creatures; otherwise it would not be possible to think the possibility of the purposive form of the products of the animal and vegetable kingdoms.* He has then only pushed further back the ground of explanation and cannot pretend to have made the development of those two kingdoms independent of the condition of final causes.

[footnote:] We may call a hypothesis of this kind a daring venture of reason, and there may be few even of the most acute naturalists through whose head it has not sometimes passed. For it is not absurd, like that generatio aequivoca by which is understood the production of an organised being through the mechanics of crude unorganised matter. It would always remain generatio univoca in the most universal sense of the word, for it only considers one organic being as derived from another organic being, although from one which is specifically different; e.g. certain water-animals transform themselves gradually into marsh-animals and from these, after some generations, into land-animals. A priori, in the judgement of Reason alone, there is no contradiction here. Only experience gives no example of it; according to experience all generation that we know is generatio homonyma. This is not merely univoca in contrast to the generation out of unorganised material, but in the organisation the product is of like kind to that which produced it; and generatio heteronyma, so far as our empirical knowledge of nature extends, is nowhere found.
- Kant, Critique of Judgment, §80

With this little footnote, Kant sets up the ruin of the whole "Critique of the Teleological Judgment." His point, as I understand it, is that the world presents us with a permanent explanatory deficit: the infinite variety and organization of things cannot be accounted for except as the manifestation of an underlying purpose that inheres in the world but cannot, properly speaking, be derived from it. The contemplation of this purpose, particularly in its relationship to man (as its apex and destination) leads us upwards to the contemplation of moral purpose, and thence to the boring, preachy rhapsodizing about duties that Kant seems to enjoy so much. (A side note: if Kant really does love writing about moral duties, doesn't that mean that his morality is not itself moral, since it is not disinterested?)

And then Darwin comes along with his "daring venture of reason" and spoils the whole game. We have no need to postulate a purpose in nature anymore; organization and speciation are simply mechanical outcomes of plain old natural causation. Our (adulterous and sinful?) generatio is both aequivoca and univoca, both homonyma and heteronyma. Kant may still raise the feeble objection that moral purposiveness can be derived through a detour, the contemplation of freedom. But Darwin makes even this highly suspect, and at any rate this argument removes the compelling explanatory necessity for purposiveness--you may be a Kantian if that's your thing, but you are no longer forced into it by the logic of your experiences.

Hence the horror vacui evolution inspires in moralists of all kinds. In nearly every creationist attack on Darwinism, the smell of fear is palpable: what if there really is no purpose? What if we are just accidents of creation, stranded on a chance rock and doomed to a futile and meaningless extinction? The typical evolutionist response, that we create our own meaning (and similar Maslovian clichés), is not really to the purpose, as it were; the goal is to be driven to morality, not to invent it freely--for otherwise the specter of nihilism still lingers. Whitehead made the point a century ago that, far from being synonymous, science and reason are adversaries. Here, science destroys the hierarchical rationalistic ordering that supports Kant's morality, replacing it with something considerably more uncertain.

But the aesthetic judgment comes to the rescue of the teleological. If we can no longer understand nature by analogy with the beautiful, as purposeful and ordered, we can now understand it by analogy with the sublime. The very abyss that confronts us when we look at natural history--the writhing mass of species evolving and becoming extinct, chaos tempered only with a fleeting and provisional fitness--becomes the source of a kind of new dispensation. The sublime, for Kant, is not significant simply because it is an experience of something utterly beyond our ken; rather, it draws its power from our awareness of the dignity, power, and responsibility of the individual in the face of infinity (a sort of reverse Heideggerianism). We experience the sublime because we are not afraid of it, and so we come to ourselves by taking hold of our ability to stand firm in the face of evolution.

This is, of course, only one possible approach, and it does not fully resolve the problem of how Kant's specific morality may be accommodated to evolution--since, after all, the new dispensation seems much more strongly to suggest an evo-psych line of thinking. In many ways, what is typically called Nietzschean morality can be interpreted as just such an offspring of Kant and positivism (see, for instance, The Gay Science, §109). The trajectory between the two, in fact, is nothing less than the historical arc of the nineteenth-century mind.

Machiavelli and His Moment

Men always praise (but not always reasonably) the ancient times and find fault with the present; and they are such partisans of things past, that they celebrate not only that age which has been recalled to their memory by known writers, but those also (being now old) which they remember having seen in their youth. And when this opinion of theirs is false (as it is most of the times) I am persuaded the reasons by which they are led to such deception are various. And the first I believe is that the whole truth which would bring out the infamy of those times, and they amplify and magnify those others that could bring forth their glory. Moreover, the greater number of writers so obey the fortune of the winners that, in order to make their victories glorious, they not only exaggerate that which is gotten by their own virtu, but they also exaggerate the actions of the enemies; so that whoever afterwards is born in either of the two provinces, both the victorious and the defeated ones, has cause to marvel at those men and times, and is forced summarily to praise and love them. In addition to this, men hating things either from fear or envy, these two reasons for hating past events come to be extinguished, as they are not able to offend or give cause for envy of them. But the contrary happens with those things that are (presently) in operation and are seen, which because you have a complete knowledge of them as they are not in any way hidden from you; and knowing the good together with the many other things which are displeasing to you, you are constrained to judge the present more inferior than the past, although in truth the present might merit much more of that glory and fame; I do not discuss matters pertaining to the arts, which shine so much by themselves, which time cannot take away or add a little more glory which they merit by themselves; but I speak of those matters pertinent to the lives and customs of men, of which such clear evidences are not seen.

...I do not know, therefore, whether I merit to be numbered among those who deceive themselves, if in these Discourses of mine I shall laud too much the times of the ancient Romans and censure ours. And truly, if the virtu that then reigned and the vice that now reigns should not be as clear as the Sun, I would be more restrained in talking, being apprehensive of falling into that deception of which I accuse others. But the matter being so manifest that everyone sees it, I shall be bold in saying openly that which I learned of those times and these, so that the minds of the young men who may read my writings can avoid the latter evils and imitate the virtu of the former, whenever fortune should give them the opportunity.
- Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Book Two

This is always the problem with being a laudator temporis acti. On the one hand, you are perpetually driven to hold up the past as an exemplar, an unbreakable and effectively flawless mirror for the inadequacies of the present; on the other, you cannot escape the aching feeling that history's real truth is "it has always been thus," and your romantic ideal is just an illusion produced by the very present that you so desperately want to escape. You're caught in a trap: you want to live in the past, but the past is only beautiful to you because you are a man of your time. Some laudatores simply pretend to ignore the problem--but this only makes them worthy of mockery.

Machiavelli takes a different approach. Old men and historians, he says, are particularly bad at depicting the past as it really was, and we risk misrepresenting the present if we believe them. But! The present is so spectacularly bad now that I am justified in adopting the pose of the laudator. This form of special pleading looks especially disingenuous here because all its wiring is hanging out: he has explicitly granted the rule but begs transparently for an exemption. He makes it ever so easy for us to dismiss him. But what if we take the Straussian view, that no great philosopher would ever say anything so obviously stupid without some ulterior motive? Could we rescue Machiavelli from himself?

Machiavelli's notion of history is more complex than simply "past" and "present." To paraphrase this classic philosophy paper, recently linked on Metafilter, there's both an A and a B series here. In other words, the historian occupies a position in the present, looking back at the past--but in Machiavelli's view, he also occupies a position in a objective historical cycle of ascent and decline, looking back upon a point in another historical cycle. On that basis, he justifies his position by arguing that if we are in a state of decline, it is worthwhile for us to look back and draw lessons from a state of ascent. This argument fails for two reasons. First, the problem of figuring out whether or not we are in a state of decline is simply the same problem as before, but deferred to another level. Second--and I'd say this is more interesting--the presupposition of an objective cycle means that we can't draw meaningful lessons from the past: decline, once begun, is irreversible.

I think it would have been possible for Machiavelli to vindicate himself in another, more honest, way. The problem with the present is not the fact that it's a state of decline--it's that the political processes that make up Machiavelli's vision of history have yet not been fully actualized. The present is messy: it's in a state of becoming. The past, on the other hand, is clear-cut. The consequences of every decision, the trajectories of political revolution (in the old sense), the personal conflicts and alliances, have already been completely resolved. Machiavelli is not much of a laudator at all; what he wants are timeless laws. It's not for nothing that he says, a bit earlier:

It is easily recognized by those who consider present and ancient affairs that the same desires and passions exist in all Cities and people, and that they always existed. So that to whoever with diligence examines past events, it is an easy thing to foresee the future in any Republic, and to apply those remedies which had been used by the ancients, or, not finding any of those used, to think of new ones from the similarity of events. But as these considerations are neglected or not understood by those who govern, it follows that the same troubles will exist in every time.

Notice how he makes a gesture of restoring agency to us: if we would only look at the ancients, we could overcome the eternal problems. But in fact the problems are eternal precisely because we can never look at the ancients.

No, he's only pretending to care about whether people take his advice. He's thirsting for the omniscience of the Greek who goes to Delphi: a sardonic smile on his face, Machiavelli stands athwart history and remains silent, secure in the knowledge that history is a regular and predictable process. The ancients would have been nothing to him if they did not, in their turn, decline. Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it; those who know history are condemned to repeat it as well--but with the satisfaction of knowing how it ends.

Western Eyes

If I believed in an active Providence,” Razumov said to himself, amused grimly, “I would see here the working of an ironical finger. To have a Julius Laspara put in my way as if expressly to remind me of my purpose is— Write, he had said. I must write—I must, indeed! I shall write—never fear. Certainly. That’s why I am here. And for the future I shall have something to write about.”

He was exciting himself by this mental soliloquy. But the idea of writing evoked the thought of a place to write in, of shelter, of privacy, and naturally of his lodgings, mingled with a distaste for the necessary exertion of getting there, with a mistrust as of some hostile influence awaiting him within those odious four walls. ...

He went back heavily to a garden seat, dropped into it. This was the place for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done. The materials he had on him. “I shall always come here,” he said to himself, and afterwards sat for quite a long time motionless, without thought and sight and hearing, almost without life. He sat long enough for the declining sun to dip behind the roofs of the town at his back, and throw the shadow of the houses on the lake front over the islet, before he pulled out of his pocket a fountain pen, opened a small notebook on his knee, and began to write quickly, raising his eyes now and then at the connecting arm of the bridge. These glances were needless; the people crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the Social Contract sat enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of bronze. After finishing his scribbling, Razumov, with a sort of feverish haste, put away the pen, then rammed the notebook into his pocket, first tearing out the written pages with an almost convulsive brusqueness. But the folding of the flimsy batch on his knee was executed with thoughtful nicety. That done, he leaned back in his seat and remained motionless, the papers holding in his left hand. The twilight had deepened. He got up and began to pace to and fro slowly under the trees.
- Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Conrad's work in general, and Under Western Eyes in particular, is a fine specimen of what Deleuze called "minor literature": a work written in a major language by someone who is in some way other to it, and thus in a sense estranges it from itself. The occasional Slavic traces left in Conrad's prose by his convoluted biography--one character, for instance, is referred to as "caressingly, Natalia," which is simply a way of denoting the diminutive--are not imperfections. Especially here, they are weapons of a sort, and they work together with Conrad's meta-reflections and interpolated narratives to produce what is in essence an indictment. Everywhere, the reader is reminded that she is not taking in a neutral text, a dispassionately presented account of events: the lenses through which the narrative is seen have a well-defined and explicit tint.

In a long and sympathetic discussion of Conrad, H. L. Mencken said of Under Western Eyes:

Here ... we also have an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the Russian character, with all its confused mingling of Western realism and Oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence of all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold to be true of human motive and human act. Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of the tale.

But is it really? Mencken's insistence on seeing "the Russian character" here is precisely the tendency that Conrad militates against. The very name of the book is one indication: the narrator is a Westerner, and it is through his eyes that we see the events in Russia unfold. "What's going on with us is of no importance," the protagonist sneers, "a mere sensational story to amuse the readers of the papers - the superior contemptuous readers of Europe." The delusion of Mencken and nearly every commentator on the "mysterious Russian soul" is that they're getting the Russian "world apart" straight from the horse's mouth--like a travelogue from an exotic country that only confirms the prejudices of the audience.

Writing, for Conrad, is never an act that simply reveals the world. The act of writing and the act of reading both create a kind of complicity: by accepting what she reads, the reader willingly or unwillingly colludes in the writer's generalized deception. Even the plot of the novel describes this same arc. The protagonist, Razumov, has committed an act of betrayal against a revolutionary comrade; he escapes to Switzerland, where everyone knows of him only through his comrade's old effusive letters--and so he can survive only by exploiting the gap between word and world. So the Russia that emerges from the pen of the narrator (a Western tutor of foreign languages) is a Russia already contaminated by ideology. And the Russian characters themselves cannot escape this process: they do not write as Russians, but as the actors of an ideological drama.

It is for this reason that the "Russian character" is actually a void. The only character here that fits Mencken's ideological image of the Russian soul is Razumov himself. But Razumov only exists through writing; note the clever twist involved in sitting down to write in front of the statue of the archetypal writer of confesssions. Razumov creates and develops his subjectivity when he writes--a diary, a political creed, a confession, a police report--and all we know of him, we know through his written work. The mysteriousness, the exhilirating contradictions, of his Russian soul are thus nothing more than the delusive product of the fundamental lie of writing. There's no there there.