Preamble
1. Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras, trans. Thomas Taylor (London, 1818), 65.
2. Pappus of Alexandria, The Commentary of Pappus on Book X of Euclid’s Elements, ed. and trans. William Thomson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930).
3. James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (New York: Knopf, 1982), 55.
Introduction
1. Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris: Fayard, 1961 [1935]), 117.
2. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997 [1944]).
3. Pascal Bruckner, The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Algora Publishing, 2007 [1995]), 19.
4. Zeev Sternhell, Les anti-Lumières. Une tradition du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 17; published in English as The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
5. Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 147.
6. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018).
7. Germaine de Staël, De la littérature, considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, in Oeuvres complètes de Madame de Staël, publiées par son fils, vol. 4 (Brussels: Louis Hauman et Co., 1830), 360.
8. Paul Lewis, “ ‘Our Minds Can Be Hijacked’: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia,” Guardian, October 6, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia.
9. See, e.g., Sam Kestenbaum, “Got Nazis? Milk Is New Symbol of Racial Purity for White Nationalists,” Forward, February 13, 2017. https://forward.com/fast-forward/362986/got-nazis-milk-is-new-symbol-of-racial-purity-for-white-nationalists/.
10. Virginia Woolf, “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection,” in Virginia Woolf: Selected Short Stories, ed. Sandra Kemp (London: Penguin Classics, 1993 [1929]), 78.
Chapter One. The Self-Devouring Octopus; or, Logic
1. See Justin E. H. Smith, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), chap. 3.
2. See Roger Bigelow Merriman, ed., The Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell: Letters from 1536 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902).
3. See Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).
4. Cited in ibid., 27.
5. See Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (March 1996): 16–22.
6. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, and Billy Budd, Sailor (London: Penguin, 2012 [1857]), 30.
7. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.12.29.
8. Lucian of Samosata, Thirty Conferences of the Dead: Diogenes and Pollux, in Lucian of Samosata, trans. and ed. William Tooke, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), 1:383–84.
9. Themistius, Orations 14, cited in Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera Omnia in sex tomos divisa (Lyon: Laurence Anisson and Jean-Baptiste Devenet, 1658), 1:88.
10. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library 212 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 3:162, bk. 16, chap. 9.
11. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.10.22, citing Plutarch, De sollertia animalium, Loeb Classical Library 12 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 359.
12. Leibniz, Projet d’un art d’inventer, in Louis Couturat, La logique de Leibniz, d’après des socuments inédits (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901), 176.
13. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum.
14. Anton Wilhelm Amo, Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi (Halle, 1738). This argument works more smoothly in Latin, where there are no indefinite articles and where “your” and “yours” are identical in form: “Haec capra est tua; haec capra est mater; ergo, haec capra est tua mater.”
15. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft §54, AA 5, 332.
16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1922). “But all propositions of logic say that same thing. That is, nothing” (5.4.3).
17. Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 10.
18. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, Pars Prima: Logica, 80.
19. See in particular Robert Nozick, “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice,” in Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, ed. Nicholas Rescher (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), 114–46; David H. Wolpert and Gregory Benford, “The Lesson of Newcomb’s Paradox,” Synthese 190, no. 9 (2013): 1637–46; Arif Ahmed, “Infallibility in the Newcomb Problem,” Erkenntnis 80, no. 2 (2015): 261–73.
20. See André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Michael F. Cusato (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
21. See, e.g., Karigoudar Ishwaran, ed., Ascetic Culture: Renunciation and Worldly Engagement, International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology (Leiden: Brill, 1999).
22. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1762), 122–24.
23. Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. W. D. Ross, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924, 1074b33.
24. Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, in The Essence of Plotinus: Extracts from the Six Enneads and Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, ed. Grace H. Turnbull, trans. Stephen MacKenna (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934), 10.
25. Ibid.
26. On the strange history of the uptake of inscrutable French philosophy within American academia, see François Cusset, French Theory. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze et Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).
27. Perry Anderson, “Dégringolade,” London Review of Books 26, no. 17 (September 2, 2004): 3–9.
28. I am drawing here mostly on my memory of a public lecture from Badiou, entitled “Les attributs de l’Absolu,” delivered at the American University of Paris on June 17, 2015.
29. Leibniz to Foucher, 1692, in G. W. Leibniz, Lettres et opuscules inédits de Leibniz, ed. A. Foucher de Careil (Paris: Libraire Philosophique de Ladrange, 1854), 89. Cited in Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard autor del Quijote,” in Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos completos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2015), 110.
30. Barry Meier, “Inside a Secretive Group Where Women Are Branded,” New York Times, October 17, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/nyregion/nxivm-women-branded-albany.html.
Chapter Two. “No-Brainers”; or, Reason in Nature
1. See John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1994]).
2. I owe this insight to D. Graham Burnett (in personal correspondence).
3. Les Murray, “The Meaning of Existence,” in Poems the Size of Photographs (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002), 104.
4. Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 128.
5. Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise 5.45, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. and ed. Edwin Curley, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Spinoza, Ethics 4, Proposition 68, Scholium, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. and ed. Edwin Curley, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
6. Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
7. For a helpful account of the distinction between these two phenomena—the detaching of the hectocotylus, or autotomy, and the eating of the arms, or autophagy—see B. U. Budelmann, “Autophagy in Octopus,” South African Journal of Marine Science 20, no. 1 (1998): 101–8.
8. Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds, 76.
9. Girolamo Rorario, Hieronymi Rorarii ex legati pontificii, Quod animalia bruta ratione utantur melius homine, libri duo (Amsterdam: Apud Joannem Ravesteinium, 1654 [1555]).
10. René Descartes, Méditations, in Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1904) [hereafter “AT”], 9:48.
11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956 [1943]), 785.
12. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (Rotterdam, 1715 [1697]).
13. Ibid., 441.
14. Ibid.
15. Dennis Des Chene, “ ‘Animal’ as Category: Bayle’s ‘Rorarius,’ ” in The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Justin E. H. Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 215–34, 219.
16. Francisco Suárez, De anima 1c5no2, in Opera omnia, ed. Charles Berton (Paris: Apud Ludovicum Vivès, 1889), 3:500. Cited in Des Chene, “ ‘Animal’ as Category: Bayle’s ‘Rorarius.’ ”
17. Francisco Suárez, Disputationes metaphysicae 23.10.14, in Opera omnia, vol. 24.
18. Emanuele Coccia, La vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange (Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages, 2016), 137.
19. Ibid., 133.
20. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
21. See Richard Marshall, “Why You Don’t Need Brain Surgery to Change Logic” (interview with Hartry Field), 3:AM Magazine, May 3, 2018. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/why-you-dont-need-brain-surgery-to-change-logic/.
22. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, trans. and ed. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 81.
23. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
24. Ibid., 7.
25. Descartes, AT, 6:2; cited in Mercier and Sperber, The Enigma of Reason, 16.
26. Mercier and Sperber, The Enigma of Reason, 203.
27. Ibid.
28. For a summary of this research, see Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), chap. 1.
29. Edouard Machery and Luc Faucher, “Why Do We Think Racially? Culture, Evolution and Cognition,” in Categorization in Cognitive Science, ed. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 1009–33.
30. See Sam Frank, “Come with Us If You Want to Live,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2015, 26–36. As Gideon Lewis-Kraus convincingly explains, this tendency in Silicon Valley culture is only one among many, even if it has received considerable, and somewhat sensationalist, press coverage. The prevailing political culture there remains a sort of passive liberalism that aligns fairly closely with the center of the Democratic Party, and that presupposes, without altogether too much reflection, that technological growth and innovation are on balance good for democracy (from personal conversation).
31. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound: A Journal of Debate, April 13, 2009. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian.
32. http://www.imitatio.org/about-imitatio/.
33. http://www.imitatio.org/team/.
34. http://rationality.org/workshops/upcoming.
35. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ouc/project_hufflepuff_planting_the_flag/.
36. Ibid.
37. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1955 [1944]), 47.
Chapter Three. The Sleep of Reason; or, Dreams
1. “Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable … ès années 1670 et 1671, envoyé au Reverend Père Jean Pinette, Provincial de la Province De France,” in Relations des Jésuites, contenant ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable dans les missions des pères de la Compagnie de Jésus dans la Nouvelle France (Quebec City: Augustin Côté, 1858), 3:22.
2. Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987), 504.
3. Aristotle, On Prophecy in Sleep, in On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library 288 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 462b13–14, 375.
4. Ibid., 1.462b20–22, 375.
5. Johannes Kepler, Somnium: The Dream, or, Posthumous Works on Lunar Astronomy, trans. Edward Rosen (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1967).
6. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Obras completas, vol. 1, Lírica personal, ed. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951).
7. Denis Diderot, Le rêve de d’Alembert, in Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 2, ed. Assézat Tourneux (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875).
8. Gaston Bachelard, La terre et les rêveries du repos (Paris: José Corti, 1948), 11.
9. Ibid.
10. Saxo Grammaticus, The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, trans. Oliver Elton (London: David Nutt, 1894), 26.
11. Ibid.
12. See Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
13. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Göttingen, 1812).
14. A. N. Afanas’ev, Narodnye russkie rasskazy A. N. Afanas’eva, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Moscow: K. Soldatenkov, 1873).
15. Elias Lönnrot, Kalevala (Helsinki: J. C. Frenckellin ja Poika, 1835).
16. Kant, Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik, in Immanuel Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Academy of Sciences (Berlin, 1902) [hereafter “AA”], 2:317.
17. Ibid., 315.
18. Ibid., 349.
19. G. W. Leibniz, “The Body-Machine in Leibniz’s Early Medical and Physiological Writings: A Selection of Texts with Commentary,” ed. and trans. Justin E. H. Smith, Leibniz Review 27 (2007): 141–79.
20. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1970).
21. G. W. Leibniz, Directiones ad rem medicam pertinentes, appendix 1 to Justin E. H. Smith, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 286.
22. Woolf, Selected Short Stories, 58.
23. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 75.
24. Ibid., 73–74.
25. Ibid., 82.
26. See in particular G.E.R. Lloyd, The Ideals of Inquiry: An Ancient History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
27. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002 [1982]).
28. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).
29. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 105.
30. Ibid., 106.
31. Ibid., 107.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 108–9.
36. See Aristotle, On Dreams 3, 461b5–8; cited in Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 115.
37. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 112.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. See W.V.O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), in W.V.O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 20–46.
41. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1997 [1899]), 278–79.
42. Ibid., 183. The translator claims to have inserted this example himself, since Freud’s own example “cannot be translated.” It is not clear, however, whether this example is one that Freud initially heard from a patient, or whether it has simply been made up.
43. Ibid., 184.
44. Vladimir Nabokov, “Conclusive Evidence,” New Yorker, December 28, 1998–January 4, 1999, 124–33, 133. See also Leland de la Durantaye, “Vladimir Nabokov and Sigmund Freud, or a Particular Problem,” American Imago 62, no. 1 (2005): 59–73.
45. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage International, 1989 [1951]), 20.
Chapter Four. Dreams into Things; or, Art
1. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1739–40]), T II.3.3 415.
2. Maxim Gorky, cited in Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 122. I have been unable to locate an original Russian source for this quotation, oft cited in English.
3. A. A. Zhdanov, “Report on the Journals Zvezda and Leningrad, 1947,” in On Literature, Music, and Philosophy (New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950), 19–35.
4. Mikhail Zoshchenko, Prikliucheniia obez’iany (Moscow: Eksmo, 2017 [1945]).
5. Zhdanov, “Report on the Journals Zvezda and Leningrad, 1947.”
6. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Borges, Cuentos completos, 105.
7. I recall first reading this observation in something written by Arthur C. Danto but am unable to locate it, or anything similar, when I go back through his work.
8. Baruch Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
9. Descartes, Méditations, AT, 58: “Que s’il est question de considerer un Pentagone, il est bien vray que ie puis concevoir sa figure, aussi bien que celle d’un Chiliogone, sans le secours de l’imagination.”
10. Blaise Pascal, Pensées de Blaise Pascal, ed. J.-M.-F. Frantin, 3rd ed. (Paris: Lagny, 1870), chap. 4, article 3, 70.
11. Ibid.
12. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King, Loeb Classical Library 141 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 3.1.2.
13. Descartes, Discourse on Method, AT, 6:1–2.
14. Descartes, Rules, AT, 10:373.
15. Kant, Critique of the Faculty of Judgment §46, AA, 5:308.
16. Antoine Galland, Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en François, par M. Galland, 12 vols. (Paris: La Veuve Claude Barbin, 1704–6 [vols. 1–7]; Paris: Claude Barbin, 1709 [vol. 8]; Paris: Florentin Delaulne, 1712 [vols. 9, 10]; Lyon: Briasson, 1717 [vols. 11, 12]). See also Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
17. Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft §46, AA, 5:307.
18. Ibid., 309.
19. Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil’s Coming (1902), in Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader (Austin, TX: Petrarca Press, 2014), 77.
20. Descartes, AT, 10:219; see also Discourse pt. 4, AT, 6:139; Principles of Philosophy, pt. 1, art. 37, AT, 8:205.
21. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational.
22. See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
23. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1.
24. Anna Kisselgoff, “Pina Bausch Dance: Key Is Emotion,” New York Times, October 4, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/04/arts/pina-bausch-dance-key-is-emotion.html?pagewanted=all.
25. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1968.
26. Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 1; cited in Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017), 28.
27. See Danielle Spera, Hermann Nitsch: Leben und Arbeit (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2005).
28. Christopher Smart, The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, vol. 1, Jubilate Agno, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 89.
29. Louis Riel, “Dissertation on Monads,” trans. Justin E. H. Smith, Cabinet Magazine 49 (2013): 26–27, 26.
30. See Karl Popper, “Philosophy of Science: A Personal Report,” in British Philosophy in Mid-Century, ed. C. A. Mace (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1951), 155–91.
31. Larry Laudan, “The Demise of the Demarcation Problem,” in Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, ed. R. S. Cohen and Larry Laudan (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 111–27.
32. See Massimo Pigliucci, “The Demarcation Problem: A (Belated) Response to Laudan,” in Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, ed. Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 9–28.
33. Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715, pt. 2, chap. 1.
34. See Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
35. See Bertrand Lemoine, “L’entreprise Eiffel,” Histoire, économie et société 14, no. 2 (1995): 273–85.
36. Jules Verne, De la terre à la lune. Trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (Paris: Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation, 1872 [1865]).
37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 2.84, in Philosophische Werke in sechs Bänden (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2013), 5:95.
38. Charles Baudelaire, Les petits tronçons du serpent. Pensées choisies et précédées d’une introduction (Paris: Sansot, 1918), 26.
39. See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1869).
40. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, no. 863, in Werke, vol. 12 (Hamburg: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1953), 487.
Chapter Five. “I believe because it is absurd”; or, Pseudoscience
1. G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1849–60), 3:562.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Crook (London: Routledge, 1994).
3. Amanda Hess, “How Astrology Took Over the Internet,” New York Times, January 1, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/arts/how-astrology-took-over-the-internet.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0.
4. Jim Lindgren, “The Six Political Groups Least Likely to Believe That Astrology Is Scientific,” Washington Post, February 20, 2014.
5. See “The Tea Party & the Circus—Final Healthcare Reform Protest,” particularly 5:18–5:54, published on YouTube March 18, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pilG7PCV448&t=26s.
6. M. Dacke et al., “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,” Current Biology 23 (2013): 298–300.
7. Cited in Kendrick Frazier, “Science and Reason, Foibles and Fallacies, and Doomsdays,” Skeptical Inquirer 22, no. 6 (1998): 6.
8. Kathy Niakan, “Using CRISPR/Cas9-Mediated Genome Editing to Investigate Mechanisms of Lineage Specification in Human Embryos,” paper delivered at the conference “Les natures en questions,” Collège de France, October 20, 2017.
9. On the notion of Promethean ambition and its significance to the history of science, see William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
10. Paul Feyerabend, “How to Defend Society against Science,” Radical Philosophy 11, no. 1 (Summer 1975): 3–9.
11. On Lysenko and Lysenkoism, see Dominique Lecourt, Lyssenko. Histoire réelle d’une ‘science prolétarienne’ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995 [1976]).
12. For a critical study of the museum, and its place in American society and history, see Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).
13. For a summary statement of his views, see Ken Ham, Six Days: The Age of the Earth and the Decline of the Church (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2013).
14. For an example of a scientific, evolutionist account of such a process, see D. C. Garcia-Bellido and D. H. Collins, “Moulting Arthropod Caught in the Act,” Nature 429, no. 40 (May 6, 2004): 6987. For a pseudoscientific, creationist account of the very same process, see David Catchpoole, “Moulting Arthropod Fossilized in a Flash!” Creation 27, no. 2 (March 2005): 45. Exclamation points are generally not typical punctuation in scientific publications, and may serve as a rough shibboleth for distinguishing them from their pseudoscientific imitations.
15. Harun Yahya, Atlas of Creation (Istanbul: Global Kitap, 2006); translation of Harun Yahya, Yaratılış Atlası (Istanbul: Global Kitap, 2006).
16. Richard Dawkins, “Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya,” website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, accessed 2006 (since removed). The relevant image of the fishing lure is found on p. 244 of the Atlas of Creation.
17. In fact Tertullian’s version was rather different, namely: “Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est,” that is, “It is altogether credible, because it is absurd.” See Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation, ed. and trans. Ernest Evans (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1956), 18.
18. For a particularly compelling recent account of the mendacity of the Trump regime, and of the cultural and political developments that fostered it, see Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018).
19. See Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
20. G.E.R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of His Thought (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 162.
21. See Joseph Lehman, “A Brief Explanation of the Overton Window,” Mackinac Center for Public Policy. http://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow#Explanation.
22. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 125.
23. For a further development of these reflections, see Justin E. H. Smith, “The Art of Molting,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67/68 (2016/17): 1–9.
24. Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
25. Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump), Tweet dated March 28, 2014. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/449525268529815552.
26. Alain Fischer, “La médecine face à la nature, un combat acceptable?” Colloquium paper delivered at “Les Natures en questions: Colloque de rentrée 2017–18,” Collège de France, Paris, October 20, 2017.
27. Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5.
28. Ibid.
29. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, 74–86.
30. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996 [1953]), 96.
31. Ibid.
32. See Margaret Wertheim, Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).
33. See Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004. It is now widely believed that Suskind’s source for this quotation was Karl Rove, though Rove denies it.
Chapter Six. Enlightenment; or, Myth
1. Eliot A. Cohen, “Two Wounded Warriors,” Atlantic, October 22, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/two-wounded-warriors/543612/.
2. This is an opportune moment to remind the reader that “or” has at least two basic meanings, each represented by its own word in many other languages, including Latin: sive is the “or” of alternative ways of saying the same thing, while seu is pure disjunction, forcing you to choose one or the other of two very different things.
3. See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
4. See in particular Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).
5. See René Girard, “Mimesis and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism,” Berkshire Review 14 (1979): 9–19.
6. Mishra, Age of Anger, 98.
7. Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 117–18.
8. Ibid., 118.
9. Ibid., 126.
10. Ibid.
11. Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
12. See Marc Fumaroli, Quand l’Europe parlait français (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2001).
13. J. G. Herder, “An die Deutschen,” in Johann Gottfried von Herder’s sämmtliche Werke, vol. 14 (Tübingen: In der J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1815), 174.
14. See Holger Nowak et al., Lexikon zur Schlacht bei Jena und Auerstedt 1806. Personen, Ereignisse, Begriffe (Jena: Städtische Museen, 2006).
15. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, ed. and trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 114; see also David P. Jordan, “Entr’acte: A Sighting in Jena,” in Napoleon and the Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 112–24.
16. Hegel, The Letters, 114.
17. Klaus Brinkbäumer, Julia Amalia Heyer, and Britta Sandberg, “Interview with Emmanuel Macron: ‘We Need to Develop Political Heroism,’ ” Der Spiegel Online, October 13, 2017. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/interview-with-french-president-emmanuel-macron-a-1172745.html.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979).
21. Brinkbäumer, Heyer, and Sandberg, “Interview with Emmanuel Macron.”
22. “Trump Praises Macron, Considers July 4 Military Parade Like One He Saw in Paris,” Reuters, September 18, 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-macron/trump-praises-macron-considers-july-4-military-parade-like-one-he-saw-in-paris-idUSKCN1BT2GX.
23. Evidently the phrase “surrender monkeys” has its origins, as an insult for the French, in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons. It appears to have first been elongated by Jonah Goldberg, “Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys from Hell,” National Review Online, April 16, 1999. https://web.archive.org/web/20150130235956/ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/204434/cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys-hell/jonah-goldberg.
24. See Justin E. H. Smith, “The Ibis and the Crocodile: Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign and Evolutionary Theory in France, 1801–1835,” Republic of Letters 6, no. 1 (March 2018): 1–20.
25. On the origins of Right Hegelianism, see Michael H. Hoffheimer, Eduard Gans and the Hegelian Philosophy of Law (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995).
26. See in particular Franz Boas, Race, Language, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940).
27. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, unabridged translation of the third edition (1744) with the addition of “Practic of the New Science,” ed. and trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948).
28. See Michel Pastoureau, L’ours. Histoire d’un roi déchu (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2007).
29. Vico, The New Science, 118.
30. Ibid.
31. See Leopold von Ranke, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1885 [1824]).
32. See in particular Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1964).
33. See in particular D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), esp. 1–21. Walker cites the well-known line of the second-century Platonist Numenius of Apamea “What is Plato but Moses talking Attic Greek?” This view would become widespread in the Italian Renaissance, notably in the work of Marsilio Ficino.
34. See Athanasius Kircher, China monumentis (Amsterdam: Apud Jacobum à Meurs, 1667 [repr. Frankfurt: Minerva, 1966].
35. See Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo. La nascità dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale: della genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziale (1500–1700) (Florence: FrancoAngeli, 1977).
36. See, for example, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015).
37. These rumors, while plausible, are generally either unconfirmed or appear to involve speakers who were themselves trying to make a joke. The earliest known occurrence dates back to a New York Times article of 1881, in which a simple farmer is reported to have asked, “What’s wrong with the good old King James version? That was good enough for St. Paul, and it’s good enough for me” (“Preaching on the Bible; Pulpit Opinions of the New Version,” New York Times, May 23, 1881, 8). More recently, a meme created in early 2014 falsely attributed to the Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann the claim that “If English was good enough for Jesus when he wrote the Bible it should be good enough for Coke,” purportedly replying to a multilingual Coca-Cola advertisement. See W. Gardner Selby, “Michele Bachmann Didn’t Say Bible Written in English,” Politifact, December 23, 2014. http://www.politifact.com/texas/article/2014/dec/23/michele-bachmann-didnt-say-bible-written-english/.
38. Matthew Arnold, “Empedocles on Etna: A Dramatic Poem,” in The Oxford Authors: Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Farris Allott and Robert Henry Super (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 98.
39. Melville, The Confidence-Man, 135.
40. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (London: Collins Harvill Press, 1960), 40.
41. Molly Jackson, “Are Open Carry Protesters Fueling Fear outside a Texas Mosque?” Christian Science Monitor, November 22, 2015. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/1122/Are-open-carry-protesters-fueling-fear-outside-a-Texas-mosque.
42. “En prison, Breivik se dit ‘torturé’ et réclame une Playstation 3,” Le Monde with Agence France Presse, February 14, 2014. http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2014/02/14/en-prison-breivik-se-dit-torture-et-reclame-une-playstation-3_4366976_3214.html.
43. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 1.12, 46.
44. See Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
45. For a comprehensive account of the relevant events and actors in the Charlottesville rally, see Joe Heim, “Recounting a Day of Rage, Hate, Violence, and Death,” Washington Post, August 14, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/?utm_term=.a083a7b926fd.
46. See, e.g., Gaëlle Dupont, “Pour La Manif pour tous, ‘c’est le moment de se faire entendre,’ ” Le Monde, October 15, 2016. http://www.lemonde.fr/famille-vie-privee/article/2016/10/15/pour-la-manif-pour-tous-c-est-le-moment-de-se-faire-entendre_5014280_1654468.html.
47. See especially Steven Heller, The Swastika: Symbol beyond Redemption? (New York: Allworth Press, 2000).
48. For an excellent survey of this literature, see Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
49. This particular claim was made by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos in their notorious post, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Breitbart News, March 29, 2016. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/.
50. See in particular Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).
51. Nagle, Kill All Normies.
52. See in particular Alexander A. Guerrero, “Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 42, no. 2 (2014): 135–78.
53. Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Chapter Seven. The Human Beast; or, the Internet
1. The text, dated October 17, 1850, is published anonymously in La Presse, in two parts, on October 25 and 26, 1850, under the title “Communication universelle et instantanée de la pensée, à quelque distance que ce soit, à l’aide d’un appareil portatif appelé Boussole pasilalinique sympathique.” The Biblothèque nationale de France has made available a digital archive of the newspaper. The relevant issues may be found at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k475317s and http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4753185.
2. Allix, “Communication universelle.” October 25, 1850.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. The secondary literature on Allix is small, but a biography may be pieced together from various sources, notably J. Clère, Les hommes de la Commune, 5th ed. (Paris: Dentu, 1872); Charles Chincholle, Les survivants de la Commune (Paris: Boulanger, 1885). For an earlier version of the present account of Jules Allix and his escargotic machine, see Justin E. H. Smith, “The Internet of Snails,” Cabinet Magazine 58 (2016): 29–37.
6. See Gustave Simon, Chez Victor Hugo. Procès-verbaux des tables tournantes de Jersey (Paris: Louis Conard, 1923), particularly the séance of September 3, 1854.
7. Allix, “La communication universelle,” October 26, 1850.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. See Masha Gessen, “Russian Interference in the 2016 Election: A Cacophony, Not a Conspiracy,” New Yorker, November 3, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/russian-interference-in-the-2016-election-a-cacophony-not-a-conspiracy.
12. On the Greek far left’s ties to Russia, see, e.g., Sam Jones, Kerin Hope, and Courtney Weaver, “Alarm Bells Ring over Syriza’s Russian Links,” Financial Times, January 28, 2015. https://www.ft.com/content/a87747de-a713-11e4-b6bd-00144feab7de. On the Greek far right’s ties to Russia, see Hannah Gais, “How Putin Is Making Greece’s Nazi Problem Worse,” Business Insider, March 26, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/putin-is-making-greeces-nazi-problem-worse-2015-3?IR=T.
13. See Summer Meza, “Jenna Abrams, Alt-Right Hero on Twitter, Was Really a Russian Troll Who Tricked Republicans and Celebrities,” Newsweek, November 3, 2017. http://www.newsweek.com/jenna-abrams-fake-russian-troll-account-700801.
14. See Nathan Tempey, “Cops Arrest Subway Riders for ‘Manspreading.’ ” Gothamist, May 28, 2015. http://gothamist.com/2015/05/28/manspreading_crackdown.php.
15. Lewis, “ ‘Our Minds Can Be Hijacked’ ” (see introduction, n8).
16. Jonathan Franzen, “Is It Too Late to Save the World?” Guardian, November 4, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/04/jonathan-franzen-too-late-to-save-world-donald-trump-environment.
17. See John Bingham, “How Teenage Pregnancy Collapsed after Birth of Social Media,” Telegraph, March 9, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/12189376/How-teenage-pregnancy-collapsed-after-birth-of-social-media.html.
18. See Scott, Against the Grain, chap. 1.
19. For a comprehensive appraisal of the role of Twitter and other social media in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, and connected events in the Middle East between 2009 and 2012, see Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain, Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For the current best account of the prospects and limits of social media in political protest, see Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). See also David Patrikarakos, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (New York, Basic Books, 2017).
20. Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” North Star, November 22, 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mark-fisher/exiting-vampire-castle.
21. Jeet Heer (@heerjeet), Tweet dated December 20, 2017. https://twitter.com/heerjeet/status/943496646515556352?lang=en. Heer is responding here to Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the Current Political Climate Is Doing to Our Country and Our Universities,” City Journal, December 17, 2017. https://www.city-journal.org/html/age-outrage-15608.html.
22. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
23. José María Gómez, Miguel Verdú, Adela González-Megías, and Marcos Méndez, “The Phylogenetic Roots of Human Lethal Violence,” Nature 538 (October 13, 2016): 233–37.
24. Terence, Heautontimouremos: The Self-Tormentor, in The Comedies of Terence, ed. and trans. Henry Thomas Riley (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1859), 139.
25. See “Syllabus on Sex and Gender Differences: How to Disprove Sexist Science,” at librarycard.org, August 14, 2017. http://librarycard.org/2017/08/14/syllabus-sex-gender-differences-disprove-sexist-science/.
26. Hannah Trees, “Normalizing Pronoun-Sharing at Philosophy Conferences,” Blog of the APA, March 20, 2018. https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/03/20/normalizing-the-use-of-preferred-pronouns-at-philosophy-conferences/.
27. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass—1860, “Proto-Leaf,” in Walt Whitman: Selected Poems, 1855–1892, ed. Gary Schmidgall (New York: Stonewall Inn Editions, 1999), 50.
28. See Pastoureau, L’Ours. Histoire d’un roi déchu.
29. For an account of the animistic ontology in which such a claim might make sense, see in particular Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).
30. Rebecca Tuvel, “In Defense of Transracialism,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 32, no. 2 (2017): 263–78.
31. Lewis R. Gordon, “Thinking Through Rejections and Defenses of Transracialism,” Philosophy Today 62, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 11–19, 12.
32. Ibid., 12.
34. Melville, The Confidence-Man, 146.
35. Jean-Paul Sartre, interview with Actuel, February 28, 1973. “Les révolutionnaires de 1793 n’ont probablement pas assez tué.”
36. Margaret Atwood, “Am I a Bad Feminist?” Globe and Mail, January 14, 2018. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/article37591823/.
Chapter Eight. Explosions; or, Jokes and Lies
1. Justin E. H. Smith, “The Gravity of Satire: Offense and Violence after the Paris Attacks,” the Pierre Bayle Lecture, Pierre Bayle Foundation, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, November 27, 2015.
2. This statement first appeared in an interview Le Pen père gave to the Russian newspaper Komsomol’skaya Pravda in early 2015. See Dar’ia Aslamova, “Zhan-Mari le Pen—‘KP’: Nam nuzhna edinaia Evropa ot Parizha do Vladivostoka,” Komsomol’skaya Pravda, January 15, 2015. https://www.kp.ru/daily/26329.4/3212604/.
3. See, most disconcertingly, the many dispatches on the topic from Jacobin Magazine from 2015 to 2017, for example, Manus McGrogan, “Charlie Hebdo: The Poverty of Satire,” Jacobin Magazine, January 7, 2017. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/charlie-hebdo-satire-islamophobia-laicite-terrorism-free-speech/.
4. Eliot Weinberger, “Charlie, encore une fois …,” LRB blog, April 28, 2015. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/04/28/eliot-weinberger/charlie-encore-une-fois/.
5. For a comprehensive, keyword-searchable archive, see “Donald Trump: The Howard Stern Interviews, 1993–2015,” Factbase. https://factba.se/topic/howard-stern-interviews.
6. Emily Nussbaum, “How Jokes Won the Election,” New Yorker, January 23, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/23/how-jokes-won-the-election.
7. Cited in ibid.
8. Rudolph Herzog, “Laughing All the Way to Autocracy,” Foreign Policy, February 8, 2017. http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/08/laughing-all-the-way-to-autocracy-jokes-trump-dictatorship/.
9. Judith L. Herman and Robert Jay Lifton, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, March 8, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/opinion/protect-us-from-this-dangerous-president-2-psychiatrists-say.html.
10. Ibid.
11. Benedictus de Spinoza, Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Verlag, 1925), Letter 50, 4, 240, 6–15. For a comprehensive treatment of Spinoza’s use of this phrase, and of Hegel’s subsequent appropriation of it, see Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “ ‘Omnis determinatio est negatio’—Determination, Negation, and Self-Negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel,” in Spinoza and German Idealism, ed. Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 175–96.
12. The term was coined by the psychiatrist Will Gaylin but given its limited popularity by Sissela Bok, in the preface to the third edition of Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1999 [1978]).
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), no. 260.
17. See Tom Bissell, “Who’s Laughing Now? The Tragicomedy of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2017. https://harpers.org/archive/2017/10/whos-laughing-now/2/.
18. W. H. Auden, “August 1968,” in Collected Poems (New York: Faber, 2007), 804.
Chapter Nine. The Impossible Syllogism; or, Death
1. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 4, ed. Donald Moggridge (London: Macmillan, 1981), 65.
2. Perry Anderson, “After the Event,” New Left Review 73 (January–February 2012): 49–61, 51.
3. “Thomas Piketty refuse la Légion d’honneur,” Le Monde, January 1, 2015. http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2015/01/01/l-economiste-thomas-piketty-refuse-la-legion-d-honneur_4548309_3246.html.
4. David Sprague, “Sex Pistols Flip Off Hall of Fame,” Rolling Stone, February 24, 2006. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/sex-pistols-flip-off-hall-of-fame-20060224.
5. Simone de Beauvoir made a strong case for thinking of aging as a central problem of the analysis of human existence, in her 1970 work La Vieillesse (translated as The Coming of Age). This work has been studied with subtlety and insight by Penelope Deutscher, in her The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
6. Jeff Maysh, “Why One Woman Pretended to Be a High-School Cheerleader,” Atlantic, July 6, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/07/wendy-brown/486152/.
7. One notable exception to this generalization in recent Anglophone philosophy is Kieran Setiya’s sharp and profound Midlife: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). It is telling, however, that an accomplished philosopher such as Setiya who takes this topic on does so somewhat in the spirit of an interruption of his ordinary work, in order to venture into “self-help.”
8. Plato, Apology 39a–b.
9. See in particular Lou Marinoff, Therapy for the Sane: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life (Argo-Navis, 2013).
10. See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 1992 [1843]).
11. See L. A. Paul, Transformative Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
12. The locus classicus for philosophical reflection on childbearing and child rearing as transformative experience is L. A. Paul, “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting,” Res Philosophica 92, no. 2 (2015): 1–23. As far as I know it is Eric Schliesser who, in a series of blog posts in 2014 and 2015, dubbed the new reflection on transformative experience in Anglophone philosophy “analytical existentialism.”
13. See Tom McCarthy, “The Edge of Reason: The World’s Boldest Climb and the Man Who Conquered It,” Guardian, September 10, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/sep/10/climbing-el-capitan-alex-honnold-yosemite.
14. Mike McPhate, “California Today: An ‘Incomprehensible’ Climb in Yosemite,” New York Times, June 6, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/us/california-today-alex-honnold-el-capitan-climb.html.
15. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 19.
16. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004).
17. See in particular Plato, Protagoras 345c4–e6.
18. M. F. Burnyeat, “Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration,” in Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 21–35, 33.
19. For some of their stories, see Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
20. L. N. Tolstoy, Smert’ Ivana Il’icha (Saint Petersburg, 1886), chap. 6.
21. See Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, 5 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984–98).
22. See in particular Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
23. William Butler Yeats, “The Choice,” in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1933), 39.
24. Charles Baudelaire, “Un voyage,” in Les fleurs du mal (Boston: David R. Godine, 1983), 334.
25. Mishra, Age of Anger, 1.
26. See Epictetus, Discourses 2.6.17–19.
27. Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
28. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 109, citing La Fontaine, Fables 30, 11.
29. It remains in any case a fundamental premise of contract law that one may not form a contract with oneself. See Charles Fried, Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 [1981)], chap. 4.
30. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).
31. See Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
32. See Yusuf Majidzadeh, “Lapis Lazuli and the Great Khorasan Road,” Paléorient 8, no. 1 (1982): 59–69.
33. See Rahul Oka and Chapurukha M. Kusimba, “The Archaeology of Trading Systems, Part 1: Towards a New Trade Synthesis,” Journal of Archaeological Research 16 (2008): 339–95.
34. Marshall Sahlins, “La Pensée Bourgeoise: Western Society as Culture,” in Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 166–204.
35. Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979).
36. For an early account of this phenomenon, see Peter Worley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo Cults’ in Melanesia (New York: Schocken Books, 1957). For a more critical treatment, arguing that the very idea of the cargo cult resulted, from the beginning, from a Western perspective that centers economic commodities in social life, see Lamont Lindstrom, Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993). The prevailing view in current anthropology follows Lindstrom in most respects, though the term “cargo cult” continues to be adapted and used freely beyond the narrow context of Melanesian ethnography in which it was first developed, not least by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in describing the mentality of the leaders of developing nations in Africa. See Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria (Oxford: Heinemann, 1983), 9.
37. See Derek Malcolm, “Krzysztof Kieslowski—Obituary,” Guardian, March 14, 1996. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/09/krzysztof-kieslowski-obituary.
38. See Thomas Bernhard, Es ist alles lächerlich. Acht philosophische Mauerhaken (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008).
39. Frits Staal, Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning (New York: Peter Lang, 1990).
40. This insight comes from Christophe Z. Guilmoto (in personal conversation).
41. Anthropologists, in contrast with philosophers, economists, and other social scientists and humanists, have been particularly insightful as to the importance of the category of “ancestors” for the ordering of human social reality. See in particular Jack Goody, Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the Lodagaa of West Africa (London: Tavistock, 1959).