Jordi Graupera

10 · 06 · 2010

Is Mixing an Art?

“Then there’s that beautiful moment at the height of creation

when someone will lean back in their chair and say

‘sounds like a record’, signifying that the whole

finally transcends the parts”.

Richard James Burgess

I

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of mixing a music record in order to determine whether it is an artistic activity or merely a technical procedure. I will begin by setting up a theoretical frame that will serve as a tool in my examination of this question. My theoretical frame is largely derived from Nelson Goodman’s autographic-allograhic distinction, Theodore Gracyk’s account of rock music as an autographic art, and Casey O’Callaghan’s sonic realism. These tools will be contrasted with several claims made by mixing engineers, and also with David Gibson’s method of expressing mixing procedures in a notational scheme as it appears in his book The Art of Mixing. I will conclude that mixing is an artistic activity because it changes the identity of records in an essential way, it is a creative activity in itself (independent of the performance and the production), and it implies, moreover, a degree of autonomy on the part of the mixing engineer. I will attempt to show that the contribution of the mixing engineer shapes the spatial and temporal content of the record’s sound, and also how this fact challenges O’Callaghan’s notion that recorded sounds entail an impoverished listening experience. Also, this contribution will raise some questions about artistic realism when applied to sound recording. However, I will claim that, as an art, mixing cannot attain full independence, because it is determined and constrained by the material produced by musicians and the artistic intention of both musicians and producers. If, despite its lack of independence, mixing can be understood as an art, I will finally attempt to show that it must be considered autographic.

II

Theoretical frame

a) Nelson Goodman

Since the invention of machines capable of automatically recording and reproducing sound, a considerable number of aesthetic theories have been presented, challenged and modified. Equally, the application of this new technology and the improvements it affords in the dissemination of music has changed the way in which we experience music and, at the same time, the way musicians create their work and are credited for it.

Before the widespread commercialization of records, the only way to experience music was by attending a live performance (or, indeed, by performing one oneself). Each performance of a musical work is unique and ephemeral as a whole and with regard also to each of its components, e.g. each of the sounds involved in, say, a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony are as unique and ephemeral not only as the whole performance of the symphony but also as any other natural sound. From one performance to another several characteristics changed and others remained equal. Art theory and the acts both of musical creation and listening required discrimination between what was integral to the work of art and what was accidental, as concerned its identity and authorship.

Of course, what is accidental in the identification of a particular work can be integral to the enjoyment of a particular performance: two orchestra directors may have different interpretations of allegro ma non troppo un poco maestoso in the first movement of the 9th Symphony and the difference between them can have a dramatic impact on the experience and quality of the respective performance, but this is irrelevant when it comes to identifying that the piece is Beethoven’s symphony number nine. Moreover, although it is virtually impossible, in any case, to reproduce identically a prior performance of a musical piece, it is worth bearing in mind that there did not exist a means of comparing would-be identical performances before the advent of recording, because performances are confined to a determinate time and space, outside of which they are not available for examination. So, keeping in mind the ineluctable variability of performances, melody, harmony and relative tempo–the sound structure– are relevant elements of the identity of a piece of music, and scoring is the only reliable way to express them.

The existence and role of scores raise the question of notational systems and their characteristics. Nelson Goodman, in his Languages of Art, famously developed a theory of notation that led him to differentiate two kinds of art, one called “autographic” and the other “allographic”. Goodman addresses the differences between these two arts during his discussion of forgery:

“Let us speak of a work of art as autographic if and only if the distinction between original and forgery of it is significant; or better, if and only if the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine. If a work of art is autographic, we may also call that art autographic. Thus painting is autographic, music nonautographic, or allographic”.

One reason behind Goodman’s distinction between painting and music lies in the place that the final product of the artistic endeavour occupies in the experiencing a given work of art. A performance of the 9th Symphony, that is, the realization of Beethoven’s composition, is certainly more ephemeral than Las Meninas by Velázquez. Although Las Meninas will also disappear eventually (as do all material things) — thus painting does not completely escape ephemerality– we can experience a performance of any musical work only once. The painting-object remains over time allowing for many experiences of it, whereas every note vanishes within the duration of the symphony. This difference concerns “re-production” in the sense that for a musical work to be experienced at least twice it is necessary to have some sort of a tool that makes it possible to re-create the work without experiencing a different opus every time. It can be argued that this problem concerns paintings too because they can only occupy one place at a given time, and, hence, in order to experience them in two different places at the same time, we would need a way of reproducing them. However, in contrast to music, a painting has durable existence and remains constantly identical to itself. Therefore, a reproduction of a painting will always be another object, while upon the completion of a performance, the work itself vanishes. In addition, performances are also (at least, minimally) different from one another. However, we do not consider them different works, nor do we give credit, say, to the conductor of the NY Philharmonic Orchestra for the authorship of a piece composed by Beethoven. As Goodman says:

“Performances may vary in correctness and quality and even in “authenticity” of a more esoteric kind; but all correct performances are equally genuine instances of the work. In contrast, even the most exact copies of the Rembrandt painting are simply imitations or forgeries, not new instances, of the work”.

One reason for this difference is that what constitutes the identity of a musical work allows us to discriminate between what is accidental and what is integral in it. From the perspective of the autographic-allographic distinction, it is clear that the identity of a musical work does not depend on everything that makes up the concert experience. In contrast, in pictorial art everything contained within the frame is relevant to its identification. At the same time, for this distinction to be operative, it is necessary to have a way of communicating and receiving, without any loss or mistake, this “essence” from one performance to the next. Otherwise it would be impossible to know whether a performance corresponds to a particular work or not. For Goodman, the necessary factor is notation, and, in the case of music, scoring: “A score, whether or not ever used as a guide for a performance has as a primary function the authoritative identification of a work from performance to performance”. Scores define the integral parts of a work, rendering the differences between two or more performances of a given score secondary to the identification of the work, as occurs with the indications of tempo that I mentioned above:

“Thus the verbal language of tempos is not notational. The tempo words cannot be integral parts of a score insofar as the score serves the function of identifying a work from performance to performance. No departure from the indicated tempo disqualifies a performance as an instance –however wretched– of the work defined by the score. For these tempo specifications cannot be accounted integral parts of the defining score, but are rather auxiliary directions whose observance or nonobservance affects the quality of a performance but not the identity of the work”.

For a notational system to be complete and correct, according to Goodman, it is required that they possess certain properties, namely, “unambiguity and syntactic and semantic disjointedness and differentiation”. (fig.1)

(Fig.1)

Accordingto Goodman, a notational scheme is syntactically dens “if it provides for infinitely many characters so ordered that between each two there is a third,” and semantically dense if “the compliance-classes are so ordered that no insertion of others in normal position will destroy density”. However, although notation is a necessary condition for an art to be allographic, (“the allographic art has won its emancipation not by proclamation but by notation”.), it is not a sufficient condition. In a sense, everything could be transposed into a notational system (Goodman calls this possibility “trivial”), but this possibility does not mean that every art is susceptible to being allographic art. In order to introduce another necessary condition for an autographic art to become allographic, Goodman poses the question of whether or not painting could become an allographic art by instituting a notational system, and his answer is as follows:

“Where a pertinent classification is lacking or flouted, a notational language effects only an arbitrary, nominal definition of ‘work’, as if it were a word newly coined. With no prototype, or no recognition of one, there are no material grounds for choosing one systematization rather than any other. [...] Thus the answer to the significant question about a notational system for painting is no. [...] In sum, an established art becomes allographic only when the classification of objects or events into works is legitimately projected from an antecedent classification and is fully defined, independently of history of production, in terms of a notational system. Both authority and means are required; a suitable antecedent classification provides the one, a suitable notational system the other. Without the means, the authority is unexercised; without the authority, the means are footless”.

What is interesting about this second condition is that, although the notational system must be defined independently of the history of production, the requirement of an “antecedent classification” actually introduces history of production into the equation. Goodman is arguing, it seems, that the notational system must exist prior to the production of the work of art, in order for the work, or its “parts”, to fall into the classification. In this sense, the history of production and implementation of the notational system is indeed relevant.

In sum, allographic arts must be reproducible, that is, they must have a notational system that, on the one hand, distinguishes between its integral and accidental parts (notating only the former); and, on the other hand, it must be unambiguous, finite, semantically and syntactically differentiated, and it must be sufficient to identify every reproduction of the work as an instance of the same work of art. Music — as it was understood before audio recording — is a paradigmatic example of allographic art.

b) Gracyk

In his book, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Theodore Gracyk argues that the emergence of Rock music changed the theoretical frame through which we understand musical art. Taking up Goodman’s notions of autographic and allographic art, he defends the claim that Rock music is an autographic art. Let us now turn to the reasons behind this claim.

Although the musical work, in the Western musical tradition, has generally been identified with its sound-structure (i.e., what appears in the scores), in Rock music, the sounds themselves, as contained in records, identify the work. Records and their history of production are both relevant elements of Rock. The process of recording in a studio fixes a definite set of properties of the work of which none is accidental: everything matters. Similar to etching, only those records copied from the original source, i.e. the final product of the studio process, are original instances of the work of art; whereas any other product with the same sound-structure, the same lyrics or arrangements, even performed by the same artists, is not.

“The Born to Run album is a musical work, but it is autographic, because notational determination is entirely irrelevant to the genuineness of its instantiations. [...] If Springsteen or anyone else rerecords the songs on Born to Run, notational fidelity [to the song’s scores] may occur (we may genuinely have the same eight songs in the same order), and it may resemble Born to Run as closely as two performances might. But it won’t be Born to Run, the work that got Springsteen onto covers of Time and Newsweek in 1975. Notational accuracy is insufficient for access to the relevant piece of rock history”.

A problem arises: strictly speaking, from Goodman’s perspective, the song Born to Run is an allographic work, but what makes it what it is in the record includes many more aspects than the score reflects. And these other aspects that go beyond what Goodman held relevant for the identity of the musical work are rooted in the history of production of the “sound of the record”. The decisions made during the production of the record determine and fix what properties and meanings “adhere to those sound structures”. Garcyck adopts a particular interpretation of Goodman’s distinction in order to include the particular case of Rock music and records:

“Adopting Levinson’s alternative analysis of the distinction, that a work is allographic if a historically indicated structure is presented and autographic if notational determination plays no role in its genuineness, we again find that our fake Born to Run [a hypothesis of an exact reproduction of the content of Born to Run] offers genuine instances of allographic works (the songs) while forging an autographic work. So it is false that the only relevant musical works are allographic. Furthermore, musical works are not restricted to sound structures plus performance-means; that is, rock musicians compose works whose replication demands far more than structural accuracy plus various limitations on performance means”.

The change that Rock brought to musicology is rooted in the invention of the technology of sound recording. It is not the only reason, according to Garcyck, but without audio recording this change would have never happened. Originally, audio recording had the purpose of transparency, that is, a perfect transmission and reproduction of a sound as if the sound was present. In his book, Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner explains how at the beginning of the commercialization of audio-reproducers (phonographs and so on) their value was mirroring. The more a phonograph is capable of deceiving the audience, making them believe that the sound coming out of the machine is real, the more it is considered good; as can be seen in the anedocte about the first public presentations of the Edison’s phonograph reported by Milner:

“Tonight’s concert was billed as a “tone test”.  [...]The invitation had mentioned something about [...] some sort of comparison between the live voice and its reproduced facsimile. Fuller (the head of the phonograph division at Edison’s company) told the audience that Edison’s machine could “hear” as sensitively as the human ear, and could therefore reproduce a sound that was indistinguishable from the original. [...] Fuller brought Miller onstage and cued up a recoding of her singing “O Rest in the Lord” an aria from Mendelssohn’s Elijah. The record began, and Miller let it play for a while. She began singing along with it, and then stopped. There were audible gasps from the audience. It was uncanny how closely Miller’s recorded voice mirrored the sounds coming from her mouth onstage. The record continued playing, with Miller onstage dipping in and out of it like a DJ. The audience cheered every time she stopped moving her lips and let the record sing for her” [...] “The audience craned forward to see when her lips stopped moving. It was the only ay they could tell when she wasn’t singing. (…) The stage lights went down. The audience was now staring into darkness as the music continued. Only hey ears could guide them, and their ears failed them. The lights came up, and there was Miller, her mouth frozen in  a smile. When had she stopped singing? The crows went wild.”.

However, very soon those who worked in the business of recording sound began to modify the way in which the music was performed and recorded in order to create new sounds, or new characteristics of old sounds, as can bee seen in another anecdote about Stokowski also reported my Milner:

“On october 6, 1929, The Philadephia Orchestra traveled to New York to play the first radio program broadcast over a network. [...] He decided he wanted to do more than merely conduct these broadcasts. When he discovered that the show’s engineer controlled the sound level and mix as it went over the air, the maestro announced, “No one controls Stokowski’s sound but Stokowski”. He insisted that NBC rig up a portable mixing board that could be placced next to him while he conducted. If Stokowski thought  the orchestra sounded too loud or too soft, he’d reach over and adjust the levels. [...] At a time when music at a session was recorded directly onto a disc-cutting machine, before postproduction sound mixing was a realistic possibility, Stokowski learned to “mix” musicians. [...] As with radio, however, Stokowski’s insistence on complete control had its drawbacks. Not only did he require that the recording engineers consult him before moving any microphones, but he insisted that a panel that controlled the microphones be installed next to him at the podium so he could tweak the sound as he conducted. [...] Besides the technical knowledge he was gaining, Stokowski was begining to conceptualize what it meant symbolically to record music electrically”.

If these changes had been just a matter of novelty, then we might merely have to address the emergence of novel instruments, like synthesizers, for example, or the introduction of the Broadwood piano, the first with a range of more than five octaves during the era of Romanticism, which led Beethoveen to use “new” notes in his late compositions. What Gracyck argues, however, is that studio work not only creates new sounds, but also changes the meaning of performances and scores by making it possible for some part of the musical art hitherto considered irrelevant for their identification, such as timbre, to become an integral part of the work.

This is why Gracyck also distinguishes between the live performance of a musical work and the performance that the artist records in the studio. Strictly speaking, a guitar riff recorded in a session is not a performance of a pre-given work. That particular guitar riff is part of a bigger work -like a brushstroke in painting- that is relevant as a whole, with all its properties (including –albeit not exclusively– its notable part). In this sense, not only those parts of the work that were considered accidental become integral parts of the recorded work, but, more important, once included in the final mix, accidental sounds — i.e., a musician coughing- that were not part of the work at all in both scores and live performances become deliberate, and must be considered an integral part of the musical work: a consequence of the artist’s intention, as is any other sound contained in the record. Furthermore, the fixed character of the record also allows for a distinction between finished and unfinished works:

“…it calls attention to the distinction between an artist’s musical activity and something more specific, namely the works that the artist sanctions as items for appreciation and critical evaluation. Musical activity includes everything from practicing scales to idle strumming of a guitar or trying out different chord sequences. Even if recorded, these snatches of musical activity are not performances in any usual sense; they are not put forth for appreciation. We distinguish finished from unfinished works.”

However, the most important difference between a live performance and a record is the capability of manipulation that musicians have in the studio, and the fact that such a capability is employed. Technology allows for a multiplicity of sound manipulation, even during live performances, but the kind of manipulation that is possible in recording is precisely the liberation of the process from the constraints of real time that apply to live performances. Records transcend the constraints of time and space, that is, the fact that a live performance must exist “here and now,” that every sound must be performed at a particular moment, with a particular duration, from a particular spot. On the contrary, among all the sounds included on a studio record, some are recorded on a certain day, and others on other days. However, once mixed and played they appear to belong to a single timeframe. Equally, some sound effects –from primitive techniques, such as the recording of vocals in a bathroom in order to obtain a particular echo, to that of a guitar recorded in an insulated room in order to obtain a flat sound, to digital technologies– also break the spatial constraints imposed on live performances. Once mixed and played, these sounds recorded in different places with different environmental characteristics produce a whole that is impossible to recreate in a single place. Records represent not only the fiction of a performance that never actually existed, but also the fiction of a performance that could, in fact, never exist.

In this sense, the medium is not “invisible”. It adds properties to the work. If the recording process were invisible, that is, in this case, inaudible, records would be secondary instances of the work, and the work would just be the studio performance; but they are not. If the medium were invisible, then, their specificity would lie squarely in the content they transmit. In Rock music, records qua media are “audible” and, moreover, an integral part of the work of art. They are not conceived and created as instances of another work, but as “primary texts”.

“Even if its subject and materials are ‘real things’ appropriated from ‘real life’, new properties are always added. In a truly invisible medium, never allowing properties over and above those present in the represented subject, the results would not be independent works or texts. It would be reduced to its content. Understanding artistic activity involves understanding the interpretative contribution of the medium to our grasp of the content”.

However, when we listen to a live performance of a pre-existing record, we can identify the songs as being the same as those on the record. Recorded songs can be reproduced by allographic means in a live performance, and they can be identified just like any other musical work, but they are only ever recorded in a way that renders the former distinction between “integral” parts and “accidental” parts irrelevant. Gracyck explains this fact by saying that Rock exemplifies two different sorts of musical works: autographic recording and allographic songs:

“I am not suggesting that rock repudiates prevailing concepts of the musical work. Rock’s use of recording as a medium does not require a wholesale rethinking of music. [...] Instead, rock adapts existing norms so that when recording is the medium, recordings simultaneously exemplify two different sorts of musical works: the autographic recording and the allographic song”.

Thus, the record is not an instance of another work, the song, as were performances before Rock. The record does not transmit a given performance; but it represents a performance. This process of manipulation, this elaboration of a total sound is what configures the work’s identity. This totality is the reason behind Gracyck’s claim that Rock music is an autographic art. The work’s identity evolves during all the phases of the album-recording process, but once released it remains fixed and there is no way to create an instance of that work, only variations and representations of it are possible. The question of the identity of the work is central to Gracyck’s claim that Rock is autographic:

“The identity of the originating sounds differs from the identity of the musical work featured on the finished recording. [...] The music’s identity was not fixed until the final stages in the record-making process. Thus the performances may be “of” that work rather than another only retrospectively. [...] The music performed to generate the basic tracks had an ambiguous identity at the time of its recording. [...] The identity of the music on the finished recordings cannot be reduced to the identity of the music when it was being performed; performances may cause all of the sounds heard upon playing the recordings without settling the identity of the musical work. Songs are present, but not in virtue of the causal relationship between recording and performance posited in the realist “recording” relationship”.

Among the things that constitute the final identity of a record there are at least two main sources: the sounds of the songs themselves and the “sound of the record”. As we have seen, songs can be understood as an allographic part of the whole record, since they can be notated, performed and recognized as the work itself. The sound of the record, however, is as unique as a painting is, and configures the autographic properties of rock, as Gracyck understands it.

III

Mixing and Casey O’Callaghan’s theory of sounds

Usually there are several individuals who contribute to the different “parts” of the record. I am not referring here to the luthiers, for example, who would be equivalent in the realm of painting to the company that makes the paint or the brushes, but rather, to be more precise, to the people that intervene in the production of the record, meaning its passage from an ambiguous identity to its final autographic product. There is no completely pre-determined pattern in the making of a record. Sometimes songs are composed prior to entering the studio, while other times songs are created in the studio, either as partial derivations of older songs or not. Sometimes, the same individuals do both the composing and the performing, different people perform these functions. Sometimes, well-funded bands can hire professional musicians to perform certain parts of the records; sometimes their own particular style in performing is essential to their sound. Sometimes the sound engineer is also the producer, and other times these two functions are separated.

Among all of these functions in the recording process, certain steps are necessary for the “sound of the record” to exist. These steps include, at the very least, composing, performing, producing and mixing (including mastering). The order in which the first three steps appear can vary depending on the recording process, but the final step is always mixing (this does not exclude the fact that mixing can take at early stages as well). I want to focus on this last step and attempt to provide an answer to two questions: first, is mixing an art? That is, should mixing be considered a creative contribution to the record, or rather a merely technical one? And second, is mixing an allographic part of the record -like songs- or is it autographic, like producing?

The work of a sound engineer in the process of recording an album includes many things. The sound engineer sets up the microphones and the jacks in a specific place; she decides how many channels to use to record a given instrument (i.e. typically, due to developments in technology, engineers place many microphones near the drums, one or even more for each drum or plate); she introduces effects in pitch, timbre, frequency, tempo, harmony, reverberation and so on. Some of these effects affect the quality or the identity of the sound itself, and others imply changes in the space where the sound is. For example, an echo added to the chorus adds a characteristic of the environment, rather than of the singer, while a change in harmonics to make a note sound tuned with the rest of the song is a modification of the sound itself. Finally, a sound engineer mixes all recorded material to create one sound, a whole from the parts. In this mixing moment, the engineer decides the grade of distinctness of each sound, the relationship and the hierarchy between them. Sound engineer Roey Izhaki, in his book Mixing audio. Concepts, practices and tools, defines mixing as follows:

“The following definition can be given: a process in which multitrack material –whether recorded, sampled or synthesized–is balanced, treated and combined into a multichannel format, most commonly two-channel stereo. But a less technical definition –one that does justice to music–is that a mix is a sonic presentation of emotions, creative ideas and performance” (bold in the original).

If a “presentation of emotions, creative ideas and performance” is one of the many necessary conditions for art, then, according to Izhaki and the majority of mixing textbooks written by sound engineers, mixing must be considered an art itself because it uses particular techniques to express emotions, ideas and performances. Moreover, if, as Duchamp said, claiming that one’s work is art is sufficient to consider any given work as a work of art, then mixing is doubtless an art if mixers claim it is. Against the technician’s account of sound engineers as mere assistants to the artist by virtue of their skills in making music sound clearer, Izhaki states: “intelligibility is the most elementary requirement of sonic quality, but it goes far beyond that”.

But, it seems, a sound engineer follows orders. There is a musician that wants a particular sound, a producer that decides how to create that sound on record, both give orders to the engineer and he executes them without adding or creating anything. The fact credit is almost never given to the engineer on an album’s cover suggests that, within the industry and among the audience, engineers are considered mere executors instead of creators of the record’s sound.

If this account were true, then as long as a sound engineer has the necessary technological skills to produce the sound desired by the musicians and the producers, it would not matter who the engineer was. This claim is difficult to contradict because the same song is almost never mixed by different engineers, and we would need two samples of the same song, taken from the same tapes, mixed by different individuals with the same technology in order to compare them. The two different mixings of Nirvana’s Nevermind, as reported by Izhaki, provided us with an example:

“One should listen to the four versions of Smells like teen Spirit mentioned below. The link between the sonic quality of a sound recording and its ability to excite us makes it fair to assume that the listed order would also make the appealing listening order –having the rehearsal demo as the least appealing listening, and the album version as the most appealing one. As per our recent discussion, it should be clear why most people find both the rehearsal demo and the live recording less satisfactory listening when compared to the studio versions. But comparing Vig’s and Wallace’s mixes gives great insight into what mixing is truly about, and what a huge difference a mix can make.

(fig2)

Both Vig and Wallace used the same raw tracks; yet, their mixes are distinctly different. Vig’s mix suffers from an unbalanced frequency spectrum that involves some masking and the absence of spark; a few mixing elements, like the snare reverb, are highly discernible. Wallace’s mix is polished and balanced; it exhibits high definition and perfect separation between instruments; the ambiance is present, but like many others mixing elements it is fairly transparent. Perhaps the most important difference between the two mixes is that Vig’s mix sounds more natural (more like a live performance), while Wallace’s mix sounds more artificial. It is not equipment, time spent or magic tricks that made these two mixes so dissimilar –it is simply the different sonic vision of Vig and Wallace. [...] Straight after recording Nevermind, it was Vig that started mixing the album. Tight schedule and some artistic disagreements he had with Cobain left everyone feeling (including Vig) that it would be wise to bring fresh ears to mix the album. From the bottom of prospective engineers list, Cobain chose Wallace, much for his Slayer mixing credits. Despite the fact that Nirvana approved the mixes, following Nevermind’s extraordinary success, Cobain complained that the overall sound of Nevermind was too slick –perhaps suggesting that Wallace’s mixes were too listener-friendly for his artistic, somewhat punk-driven, taste”.

Several things are relevant in this anecdote. First, the difference between the first three and the last recording recalls Gracyck’s concept of fixed identity. The rehearsal version is the unfinished work, thus its identity is still ambiguous. The live performance version plays the role of documentation of a historical fact, namely, a performance, and the mixer does not manipulate it: its goal is fidelity and a kind of transparency. The difference between the third and the fourth version lies in Cobain’s intention. Thus, strictly speaking, only Wallace’s mix counts as the original work. The fact that Cobain decided to change Vig for Wallace shows that, actually, the artistic intention belongs to him, because he makes the relevant decision to fix the final identity of the album. However, both his “artistic disagreements” with Vig’s mixing, and his complaints about Wallace’s final mixing also show that the engineer maintains a certain degree of autonomy that allows him to change the final identity of the work beyond the intention of the musician.

The autonomy of the mixer raises a central question: what exactly is changed in the mixing? If we take a look at the history of mixing, beyond the obvious fact that it is determined by the technological development in recording and mixing, it is easy to see that the change that made mixing relevant is related to the possibility of breaking with the notion that the mixer’s job is to record the sound exactly as produced by the musician. Bobby Owsinsky explains the change in these terms:

“In the early days of recording in the 1950s, there really wasn’t mixing per ser because the recording medium was mono and a big date used only four microphones. Of course, over the years, recording developed from capturing an unaltered musical event to one that was artificially created through overdubs, thanks to the innovation of Selsync (the ability to play back off of the record head so that everything stayed in sync), introduced in 1955. The availability of more and more tracks from a tape machine begot larger and larger consoles, which begot computer automation and recall just to manage the larger consoles fed by more tracks. With all that came not only an inevitable change in the philosophy of mixing, but also a change in the way that a mixer listened and thought”.

These technological possibilities and the fact that they were used in a particular way and with particular goals led to the same debate that every change in artistic technologies and techniques produces: the question of fidelity, which is a form of the philosophical problem of realism. The fact that these debates are reproduced every time, and that the terms of the debate always express a tension between standard practices and new ones supports Goodman’s claim that realism is a matter of habit. Virgil Moorefield reports this same tension in the case of mixing through the reservations voiced by two of the most influential producers of the XX century when mixing opened the door to creating some new kinds of fictions in sound recording:

“Like [John] Hammond, [Mitch] Miller was ambivalent at best about multitrack recording, faulting the modern processes of overdubbing and punching in as techniques which rob music of its spontaneity and vitality. For both producers, and probably for their generations as a whole, modern recording processes such as editing, splicing, overdubbing, and remixing were a form of dishonesty. In this worldview, a valid musician is a virtuoso, and the ability to perform in real time is paramount”.

However, there was a real change with the introduction of these new practices in the manner that recorded sound was perceived. I would like to claim that the work of the mixing engineer changes the ontological character of sounds. In order to make such a claim I need to rely on a realistic conception of sound. Sounds must be something, a kind of material with determinate properties, which, once changed, transform their identity. I will follow Casey O’Callaghan’s theory of sound to outline such a conception.

Against “visuocentrism”, a traditional conception of the objects of perception that gives preeminence to vision, and considers sounds as mere properties of objects -like colors- that are ultimately a product of our brain as it decodes those properties, O’Callaghan offers a very different account that suggests sounds are things in themselves:

“Suppose sounds are not merely mental artifacts of sensation. Suppose that a sound can seem distinct from oneself, and that subjects sometimes really do hear sounds. Sounds, that is, frequently are the targets of perspective. Realism bout sounds –sonic realism– is the view that the world contains sounds whose existence is not entirely dependent upon the auditory experiences of subject. Realism about sounds as I shall develop it maintains, furthermore, that the world of sound is not a distant realm occupied by alien entities or attributes. Sounds are in the world. Sounds are entities that, in the first instance, we auditorily perceive”.

If sounds exist as such, then what kind of things are they?

“Sounds, I propose, are events. My proposal aims to capture not only the sense in which sounds seem located in one’s environment, but also the sense in which sounds are creatures of time. Much as visible colors are bound up with the extended spaces of volumes and surfaces, sounds are inextricably connected with time and have durations”.

Thus sounds are particulars that happen in a place and during a time. Their space and time are their circumstances, and their identity as events is formed by their properties. We can perceive –that is, hear– at least some of them. And these audible properties let us recognize their identity and distinguish them from their sources:

“…sounds appear auditorily as distinct particulars that bear similarity and difference relations to each other based on their complexes of audible qualities –the properties of pitch, timbre, and loudness -to which their identities are tied. Sounds, I want to suggest, have identity, individuation, and persistence conditions that require us to distinguish them from properties of the sources that we should understand to make or produce sounds”.

The fact that we can perceive these particulars, the fact that these particulars happen in a given place and time and the fact that we identify them through their properties imply that sounds provide information about the space where they exist as well as their temporal duration:

“Audition furnishes 360º awareness of a three-dimensional spatial field and directs the orientation of visual attention toward the sources of perceived sounds. Awareness of sounds provides information about the sorts of objects that populate the environment, about what those objects are doing and about how they interact”.

Records are combinations of sounds. Thus, according to O’Callaghan view, they are events, creatures of time that have a location and provide information about the environment and the passing of time. However, recorded sounds are different from natural sounds. The most important difference, I believe, is the ambiguity of their source. In some sense, the source of the sound of the album Vaivén by Jorge Drexler that I am listening to while writing this paper is the speaker of my computer. As O’Callaghan says, the sounds I hear from my computer furnish 360º awareness of a three-dimensional spatial field. However, in another sense, I hear the guitar and the bass and the voice of Jorge Drexler and I know that those are the sources of these sounds. Moreover, I hear the voice as being closer to me than the guitar. And the bass, I hear it as somehow underlying the voice. In my head, especially when wearing headphones, I can see where these instruments are placed in an imaginary space: Jorge Drexler is in front of me, to his left the guitar player, to his right, a little further behind him, there is the bass player and behind all of them there is the drummer with his jazz drums. Furthermore, as if they were very distant, I hear a sort of choir, but if I draw my attention to it I recognize Drexler’s voice singing in multiple layers. Also, the guitar has some reverb, as if it were played inside a small bathroom, but the bass sounds dry, as if it were played in a room full of pillows.

Not only can I tell the difference between the speakers and the instruments as sources of the sound, I can also reach two simultaneous forms of awareness in time and space. Changes in timbre, pitch and volume change my image of the band, but not the awareness of my computer’s speakers as a source. Moreover, just as I know perfectly well that it is impossible for Drexler to sing two different melodies at the same time, it is also impossible that the sounds occuring simultaneously on his album - one, for example, sounding like an effect produced in a bathroom, and the other the effect of being produced in a padded cell - have their sources in the same space.

As we have seen above, the unnatural properties of records are responsible for their autographic character. The question remains, however, how much of this fiction is the mixing engineer responsible for?

IV

The Art of Mixing

In his book, The Art of Mixing, mixing engineer David Gibson enumerates 11 aspects of a recorded piece of music: concept or theme, melody, rhythm, harmony, lyrics, density, instrumentation, song structure, performance, quality of the equipment and the recording, and the mix. Since his book is a manual for mixing engineers, he focuses on teaching how to mix. His first claim is that what mixing does is place the sounds recorded in the studio in an imaginary space:

“[One] way we perceive sound is by imagining sounds between the speakers. The apparent placement of sounds between the speakers is called “imaging” because it is a figment of our imagination. So you see, we’re not talking about reality here. When we imagine a sound, like a vocal, to be between the speakers, there is, in actuality, no sound there. The same sound is coming out of both speakers, traveling throughout the room, and we just imagine the sound to be between the speakers. The same thing happens when you listen through headphones:

(fig3)

[...] A wide range of dynamics are created by different placements of sounds between the speakers, and these dynamics are utilized to create all the various styles of mixes that fit all types of music and songs.

Gibson has invented a way of representing this space between speakers that (in a stereo record) we imagine. Drawing a three-dimensional space between two speakers, the mixing engineer places each sound in a relative position to the limits of the space and to the other sounds. Panning is represented as a place left to right; volume as front to back; and pitch as up and down (fig4)

Fig4

(fig4)

Each instrument recorded separately is represented as a globe, sometimes as a perfect sphere and other times as different round geometrical shapes. Their size expresses absolute volume and its shape, a frequency range. The distance between spheres expresses their distinctness or their overlapping. Many characteristics of the mix are represented by the different relationships between their shape and the space they occupy on this imaginary stage between speakers. An example of a section of a recorded song would be fig5.

What this method shows is that the mixing engineer actually creates the fiction of a space and time that goes beyond the intention of the artist, which has a language of its own, and which is an integral part of the final identity of the record.

Moreover, acknowledging this implies a challenge to O’Callaghan’s conception of recorded sounds. According to O’Callaghan, recorded sounds provide an impoverished and illusory experience compared with the original or a non-recorded sound: “According to my ‘illusory perspectives’ account, hearing the recording in your living room is a way of perceiving the sound of Hendrix performing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Your experience of that sound, however, is impoverished and illusory in a number of respects, including its spatial and temporal perspectival contents”.

Apart from the fact that O’Callaghan does not distinguish between recording a live performance and a recording an album in the studio, there is an important difference between “illusory” and “impoverished”. What the mixing engineer does with the tapes he works on is an illusion, but what he does in creating this illusion is manipulate the audible properties that configure the identity of the sound in order to produce an effect on the listener, so that the latter may imagine a space and a time equivalent to the awareness of any other type of non-recorded sound. In order to see if this illusion implies an impoverished experience or an experience as rich as the one that non-recorded sounds produce we should ask whether or not this illusion completely deceives the listener. Here again, we are facing the classical question of realism. To start with, the spatial and temporal content of the record, as we have seen, is a fiction. It is a representation of a performance that never existed as such. This case introduces a new perspective in the dispute about mind-dependent and mind-independent accounts of artistic realism.

O’Callaghan claims that recorded or transmitted sounds do not need a decoding to be understood, and in this sense, recorded sounds would be transparent. Therefore, the experience of listening to a record would not be an impoverished experience. Although it would only be an “illusory” experience, it would nevertheless have full spatial and temporal content. On the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, one can perfectly tell the difference between the speakers and the instruments as sources. But, is it due to the other senses, namely vision, that one can tell the difference? Is the fact that I am do not see Jorge Drexler but rather only my computer, the give-away that I am listening to a record? Or is there something in the sound of a record that tells me that I am not listening to a live performance? Are audiences fooled by playback?

Fig5

fig5: Visual O. The Alarm Clock Section in “Time” on Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd

Fig6

Fig 6:Visual H. Acoustic Jazz Mix. Gibson: “Note the incredible cleanliness and clarity of the overall mix. The bass is panned to the right and doesn’t have much high end. The guitar is right out front with the piano and the hi-hat. The kick is quite loud, which is not typical”.

If we answered this last question in the affirmative, then the illusion created by the mixing engineer would be complete. But, following Goodman, if one could be fooled by a playback performance, would this deception be caused by rock bands’ habit of using records as primary texts and live performances as representations of those records; or would it be the use of amplified electric instruments in live performances, as Gracyk points out, that sound like the sounds on the record?

Be that as it may, it is clear that the contribution of a mixing engineer in the production of a record is essential to the identity of the record; and it is also a creative and autonomous activity. A record is a collective product, and there is a director –sometimes the musician, sometimes the producer, sometimes the marketing director of a recording company, etc– but the role played by the mixing engineer is an artistic one.

Finally, we need to determine if the art of mixing is an autographic or an allographic part of the broader autographic rock music recording art. As we have seen, in order for us to consider art allographic the difference between original and forgery must be significant, the history of production must be irrelevant, and the art must have a notational system as an authoritative precedent. Even if Gibson’s method could be considered an authoritative precedent, it is clear that his notational scheme is not a notational system, because it is not semantically nor syntactically differentiated and finite, nor is it unambiguous (some positions in the stage may signify both panning and pitch, depending on the way that perspective is understood in the three-dimensional stage); and it is also fatally redundant (volume, for example, is represented in two different ways, that may contradict each other). Between each pair of successive marks and between each pair of the sounds denoted by these marks there can always be a third, more similar to each member of the pair than each member is to the other. The question of forgery is rather difficult because, since every mixing engineer works with different material and with different goals, the best one can do is imitate a style (Fig6). Is it possible for a mixing engineer to take old tapes of an old record and copy the exact mixing that shaped that old record? Would Gibson’s system be precise enough to copy a mix? No. And finally, the history of production of the mix is as relevant as the history of production of the rest of the record. Therefore, if it is assumed that mixing is an art, then we must say, for now, that it is an autographic art.

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25 · 05 · 2010

The Secularization of Hell in Hobbes’s Leviathan

“Those who believe in heaven on earth,

he said,

are creating hell

-he made it sound that way too-

it was very lucid”.

Greene Graham Our Man in Havana,^[1]

I

Introduction: Conditions of Belief

The main goal of Hobbes’s theory of state is to secure peace^[2]. Peace is for Hobbes the only possible road to prosperity^[3]. Hobbes understands peace as absence of war: “For as to the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together, so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace”.^[4] Peace within the boundaries of a country, -that is, peace under the jurisdiction of the state,- is reached through the erasing of all factions and their ideological or religious disunion. Unity is the foundation for peace and for a durable and stable form of government.

In order for unity to arise, Hobbes develops a series of political strategies. I call them “strategies” instead of “principles”, because Hobbes is a realist, like Maquiavelli, not a moralist. He does not seek a state that works based on certain moral principles; he just wants a commonwealth that works. With his theory of state Hobbes became one of the centers of the ever-growing spiral of modern political science, although he was and still is perceived as a negative, provocateur, figure in its development. He was a conservative, according to the advocates of modernity, because he didn’t see the new form of better governing that was coming to birth at his time, that is, a legal, limited form of government. On the other hand, he was the prophet of a mechanistic, totalitarian state, according to modernity’s detractors because he applied the scientific optimism of his age to the form of the state^[5].

At first glance, it seems that what Hobbes is trying to do in his systematic project is to unify the methods of the natural sciences with the method of the civil sciences -that he claimed to have invented. From the study of natural phenomena, and their impact on our mind, he would be able to obtain scientific knowledge of political phenomena. In this hypothesis, we would just face a problem of scale. Nations behave as individuals, but on a bigger scene of forces. The study of movement, and the forces that cause it, is the object of study of the science of nature, the science of man, and the science of the state. The force of gravity puts world phenomena in order, brings cosmos to chaos, just as the force of the sovereign puts citizens-phenomena in order, brings political cosmos to the war-chaos. This is: facts, reason and experience against superstition, theology and opinion. If we had to summarize this manner of understanding Hobbes’s philosophical endeavor we could write the following motto: “Reason against chaos”.

However, Hobbes did not only use scientific concepts in creating his theory of the state. The monster Leviathan is the most apparent example of it: it is a myth that, beyond its metaphorical meaning, plays the role of a frightening myth in his system. It is true that this monster is, at the beginning, described as an automaton, but finally it is, above all, a mortal God.

In his time, Hobbes also faced political adversaries that went beyond religious ideas as they were understood in the middle ages. The use of some sort of science in thinking politics, the wave of modernization, was more spread out than some interpreters tend to think when they write about Hobbes as a unique figure. The work of humanists –as Quentin Skinner has explained throughout different works^[6]– began as soon as XII century Italy, and developed a new way of understanding sovereignty that challenged the power of emperors and popes with the arrows of the new conceptions of freedom, republic or individual. And this development ended up creating a corpus of political thought aimed at limiting all power, religious or political. Hobbes’ work amounts to a direct attack on some of these conceptions of power, as well as on its anthropological and theological grounding. Hobbes is not an isolated figure who tries to introduce science into politics, but rather, to put it more accurately, an outstanding mind that wants to express and demonstrate his convictions with the means available to him at the time.

As Leo Strauss states:

“These obstacles [of his theory] are mainly due to the fact that Hobbes tried to base his political philosophy on modern natural science. The temptation to take this away could hardly be resisted. As traditional moral and political philosophy was, to some extent, based on traditional metaphysics, it seemed necessary, when traditional metaphysics was replaced by modern natural science, to base the new moral and political philosophy on the new science. [...]. If the significance of Hobbes’s principle of “right” was to be duly recognized, it had, therefore, first to be shown that the real basis of his political philosophy is not modern science”.^[7]

Furthermore, as Skinner has shown^[8], some of Hobbes’ central ideas were in his mind and drafts before his conversion to science and beyond his poor understanding of mathematics. This is not to say that his scientific approach is nothing more than smoke and mirrors to conceal his ideology, but rather that the picture Hobbes’ paints would be incomplete if we didn’t explain his œuvre also as an appeal to fear, beyond his appeal to reason and sensuous experience.

Even his innovations in rhetoric or the theory of representation, (his linguistics, so to speak), have been understood sometimes as a way of creating new definitions of concepts based on facts. It is true that Hobbes challenges his tradition and to do so, he even challenges the definition of political science; and with it, the definitions of all political concepts. And he founds all his new definitions on reason, experience and a certain kind of political realism. This is absolutely clear in the Leviathan. Apparently, this method should get rid of the traditional use of language in politics –which is a mixture of symbolical power and identitarian ties–. However, not only does Hobbes seem not to imply that this kind of language is destined to disappear, but also it is evident –already from the title of the book we are analyzing– that he is using the symbolic and historical power of words to achieve his political goals. Throughout the Leviathan, Hobbes’ rhetoric is designed to have an emotional appeal. But, as we will see, an enormous part of his theory consists in a war over the meaning of words, and also consists, moreover, of a theory aimed at demonstrating who or what is to be the ultimate authority that determines what words mean. As a nominalist, words, for Hobbes, do not have a natural meaning. For him, concepts as such do not exist; the only thing that exists are men who utter words to signify things. The interpreter of words is thus always a political interpreter^[9], an aribitor, and, for Hobbes, the meanings of words is valid only as long as it is oriented towards achieving peace in the commonwealth. The meaning of words must always be a public meaning, and this public meaning must always be hegemonic.

In summary, Hobbes has been understood as the pitiless founder of a social science based on calculative reason. We have said that the main goal of Hobbes’s theory of state is peace. In order to overcome human insecurity in the state of nature, which leads to war (that is, mistrust and competition) reason helps human beings in the form of rules. But reason alone is not enough; if it were, fear would be unnecessary. And fear is essential to make possible a life in accordance with reason. In other words, “if we want peace, we must also want an irresistible power that renders all violence absurd”.^[10]

The birth of a modern political science, in one extreme, is part of “a painful and costly process of liberation from the religious burden and the theological confusions of the time”. At the other extreme, it is “the maximum proponent of leaving behind the practical wisdom contained in the works of Aristotle and Cicero”.^[11] Free from religion and classical ethics. In this process, according to Hobbes, the role of fear is, at least, as important as that of reason.

We are witnessing in Hobbes’ work one of the first decisive steps of a enormous movement in the West. A movement that I call secularization. In this paper, I propose a reading of Hobbes that places him within the history of secularization broadly speaking. However, I aim to distance myself from other dominant intepretations of Hobbes. Historicist interpretations of Hobbes convincingly situate his work as a response to the the English Civil Wars, however, they often harbor a too narrow understanding of Hobbes, the political theorist. Also, the interpretation of Hobbes against the background of the Enlightment and scientific rationality provide arguments for Hobbe’s significance in the historical process of secularization. In addition, interpretations of Hobbes from the point of view of linguistics are successful in demonstrating the importance of rhetoric in Hobbe’s theory of the state, however, they tend to fail to understand that redefining political concepts from the point of view of power implies the beginning of the end of absolute meanings and this move is essential in the history of secularization. I include Hobbes among those who have created a theoretical basis for secularization, because in the Leviathan there is a strong attempt to turn all transcendence into contingence. It is an attempt to make temporal (that is, secular), everything that was understood as atemporal; visible all that was invisible; touchable all that was untouchable, etc. In sum, Hobbes’ Leviathan represents a way of turning belief into rational expectations of danger and price, namely, reasonable fear. I will claim that the ultimate result of this attempt is a complete secularization of the idea of hell. The idea of secularized hell, as we will see, is at the service of the sovereign’s power.

Besides the common understanding of Secularization, that is, turning human what was divine, I use in this paper Charles Taylor’s third definition of secularity^[12]:

“So secularity 3 [in this third meaning]…, as against 1 (secularized public spaces), and 2 (the decline of belief and practice), consists of new conditions of belief; it consists in a new shape of the experience which prompts to and is defined by belief; in a new context in which all search and questioning about the moral and spiritual must proceed”.^[13]

This passage raises an idea that I believe to be central to Hobbes’ goals. Once Hobbes founds his theory of the state upon fear, it is necessary for him to marginalize all other fears, especially if they are greater than the one he uses as the principal binding force of the state. If the fear of the sovereign did not eclipse all other fears, it would be a useless for Hobbes’ purposes. People must believe that what follows as a result of disobeying the sovereign is scarier than what comes from all other forms of disobedience, including religious disobedience. Thus, for Hobbes, it becomes necessary to create new conditions for belief. Hobbes’ new condition for belief–a sort of rationality that finds its limit in loyalty to the sovereign and the covenant of the commonwealth–is already a form of subordinating religion to politics. And, although he is not a moralist in our contemporary meaning, he does need to develop a new eschatology that makes the stability of the state become the only final goal, that is, a moral horizon. As Koselleck says: “We know the process of secularization, which transposed eschatology into a history of progress”.^[14] In other words: he will negate all final spiritual goals. In this emptiness, politics’ and life’s contingencies are overcome only by the artificial immanence of manmade peace.

In this paper, I will attempt to show that Hobbes’ concrete battle against the Catholic Church and, by extension, the secular power of all spiritual institution needs to achieve (and ends up obtaining) a complete secularization of the idea of hell. By analyzing the work of fear in men’s behavior, he will transport religious fear into political fear. I will also show how, by doing this, he creates the theoretical conditions of possibility for an actual temporal hell (the worst conceivable evil) as a mean for politics.

II

The Role of Fear in Hobbes’ Theory of State

Hobbes founds his project on human flaws, rather than human virtues. This is the main difference between him and most humanists^[15]. It can be understood as anthropological pessimism, but it also shows some confidence in men’s products, like politics. Politics do not change men, but they can improve life. In this sense, it is rather difficult to discern what is a flaw and what a virtue, what matters is the role both passion and reason play in securing peace and stability in the commonwealth. The passion known as “fear” is at the center of Hobbes’ conception of man. And, therefore, it will be at the core of his theory of state.

One idea is unveiled: Every particular fear is eclipsed in the more essential fear of pain and death. Fear is a powerful passion that overcomes all other incentives. Fear is the motor inside both the law of nature and the “right of nature”. Fear of death is what leads men from the state of nature to the covenant of the Commonwealth. Fear of pain and death is what makes them obedient to a sovereign. And fear of death can lead to the end of a Commonwealth or the defenestration of the sovereign. Fear of death is a ubiquitous concept in Hobbes’ theory.

However, fear is not a rational mechanism, not even a word thinkable in terms of reason: “…in reasoning a man must take heed of words which, besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker, such as the names of virtues and vices, for one man calleth wisdom, what another calleth fear, and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination”.^[16] Hobbes is very aware of the usage that fear has had in the history of power and deceit, and the importance of possessing and control its extent, its meaning. And he is obviously also aware of the need for fear in order to coerce men into a reasonable behavior and into founding a lasting form of Commonwealth. The reason for that comes from the observation of men’s behavior, and the understanding of the role of irrationality in everyday human affairs. As Leo Strauss affirms:

“It is striking that Hobbes prefers the negative expression “avoiding death” to the positive expression “preserving life”. It is not difficult to discover the reason. That preservation of life is the primary good is affirmed by reason and by reason only. On the other hand, that death is the primary evil affirmed by passion, the passion of fear of death. And as reason itself is powerless, man would not be minded to think of the preservation of life as the primary and most urgent good, if the passion of fear of death did not compel him to do so”.^[17]

On the one hand, Hobbes sees in the fear of pain and death the basis for the commonwealth. It does not matter what the exact, historical or circumstantial origin for a commonwealth is. Neither the form of the government nor that of the commonwealth matters. The fashioning of civil society out of the state of nature is precisely the fear of such a state^[18]:

“A commonwealth by acquisition is that where the sovereign power is acquired by force; and it is acquired by force when men singly (…) for fear of death or bonds do authorize all the actions of that man or assembly that hath their lives and liberty in his power. (…) And this kind of dominion or sovereignty differeth from sovereignty by institution only in this, that men who choose their sovereign do it for fear of one another, and not of him whom they institute, but in this case they subject themselves to him they are afraid of. In both cases they do it for fear”.^[19]

In this sense, Hobbes is substituting the fear of pain and death in the state of nature for the fear of pain and death that could come from the sovereign. In transferring this fear, and in linking it to disobedience -that is, to law- the Commonwealth creates a fearless space and time that make progress possible. But the importance of fear in Hobbes’ theory of State as it is developed in the Leviathan is not limited to the origin of the commonwealth. From fear of pain and death comes the desire to obey a common power, the stability of the law and also the appearance of individual right outside the commonwealth.

In what concerns the “obedient desire,” fear of the sovereign’s power serves as a kind of liberation, because this always particular fear has universal significance: the individual’s fear is everyone’s fear; and since this fear stops others from attacking one’s life and property, it is possible to focus one’s capacities on pursuing prosperity. As if a sort of division of labor were proposed here, the existence of one central power feared in common supplants the fear of others:

“Desire of ease and sensual delight disposeth men to obey a common power, because by such a man doth abandon the protection might be hoped from his own industry and labour. Fear of death and wounds disposeth to the same, and for the same reason”.^[20]

Once this fear is directed at the sovereign, since it is the most powerful passion, the law of the sovereign becomes the most protected good of the society. Law becomes the limit for all violence; and disobedience the first move that turns on the mechanism of punishment. “Of all passions that which inclineth men least to break the laws is fear. Nay (…) it is the only thing that makes men keep them”.^[21] Outside the law there might be personal wealth and pleasure, but undoubtedly the monopoly of violence that the sovereign has guarantees that outside the law there is pain and death. Thus between the law and men there is only fear. It is not until that conscience of fear appears that men accept and understand the reasonability of a concrete law.

Accordingly, once understood that fear of death is the most powerful passion and the only thing that binds entirely, the danger the commonwealth faces is that the sovereign could not attract all fear or, at least, the greatest fear. Actually, a version of this strategy is stated by Hobbes as the just cause for breaking the covenant of the commonwealth: once the sovereign can no longer guarantee security, one is not bound to his law anymore. So, consistently, in any case, when fear of death is present, both the right and the law of nature allows an individual to disobey the law: “If a man, by terror of present death, be compelled to do a fact against the law, he is totally excused, because no law can oblige a man to abandon his own preservation”.^[22] Again, this is not a moral law, it is a realist statement: if fear is the most powerful force, then it is so even beyond the sovereign’s force. The only limit of fear is another greater fear. “It is even shown that it is only on the basis of fear of death that life comes to concord and that the fear of death is the only ‘postulate of natural reason’”.^[23]

Actually, notwithstanding the evident presence of fear in the origin of a commonwealth as such, — that is, its role in maintaining a stable obedience–, fear makes his work everywhere else. And it is used as a binding force everywhere else. Especially, all structures of power are based on this fear of pain and death. Consequently, if Hobbes wants to achieve his goal of total unity and loyalty to a certain form of state, he also needs for his commonwealth to destroy all other fears, or, at least, he needs to create a state lead by he who is most feared.

So, in some sense, Hobbes is relating a battle of fears. The fear of death in the state of nature against the fear of the sovereign. The one that appears as the greater will rule. Carl Schmitt sees this battle in the relationship between the Leviathan and the Behemoth:

“In essence, however, both the peace-enforcing function of the state and the revolutionary, anarchistic force of the state of nature are comparable elementary forces. According to Hobbes, the quintessential nature of the state of nature, or the behemoth, is none other than civil war, which can only be prevented by overarching might of the state, or leviathan. It follows that one of the monsters, the leviathan “state”, continuously holds down the other monster, the “behemoth” “revolutionary people”.^[24]

Among all fears, though, the one that most threatens the power of the sovereign is spiritual fear. Hobbes repeatedly insists on denouncing the superstitious fears as they are grounded in religion. He wants to show that churches and priests channel the fear of God to secure their own power on earth. They take the greatest fear in order to get the greatest power. However, the fear with which the Church trades includes several types of deceit and grades of power. Some of them can be overcome through reason, but others will be only overcome by a greater fear. Superstition and folkloric religion is the first target for Hobbes, and he attacks it from the very beginning of the Leviathan. Here is the first formulation of it in the Leviathan:

“There is no doubt but God can make unnatural apparitions. But that he does it so often as men need to fear such things more than they fear the stay or change of the course of nature, which he also can stay and change, is no point of Christian faith. But evil men, under pretext that God can do anything, are so bold as to say anything when it serves their turn, though they think it untrue; it is the part of a wise man to believe them no further than right reason makes that which they say appear credible. If this superstitious fear of spirits were taken away, and with it prognostics of dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience”.^[25]

This passage shows one of the most important enemies that Hobbes’s faces in order to complete his theory of the State. The church will have the greater power unless the state can incorporate the fear that the church traffics in. Obviously, this is not Hobbes’ innovation. The relation of powers between the church and the state represents the main battle at the dawn of modernity. Hobbes needs to defeat the power of the Church, and more in general, the power of the atemporal, the power of transcendence, the power of God in people’s mind. At this point in the history of secularization, different paths were available. From Luther and his primacy of conscience to the separation of the State and the Church, all kinds of solutions were advertised. Hobbes’ solution is based on his theory of fear. He needs either to destroy religious fear or introduce it into the prerogatives of the State. As we will see, Hobbes’ way-out will be the concentration of all powers -that is, all fears- in the figure of the sovereign. And to do so, he transforms the invisible fear of the spiritual pain into a visible fear of the corporeal pain.

III

The Fight Against the Church

In his fight against the primacy of religion over politics Hobbes undertakes, at least, three main battles. The first is the battle of reason against superstition, the second is the battle of unity against division and the third, that includes them all, is between the sovereign’s power and the church’s power.

II.a. First battle: reason versus superstition.

In the first part of the Leviathan entitled Of Man, which is the anthropological part of his theory, there is a chapter (On Religion) that deals with the origin and deceits of “gentile” religion.

“And in these four things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion, which by reason of different fancies, judgements, and passions of several men hath grown up into ceremonies so different that those which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to another”.^[26]

Of these four things the first two (“opinion of ghosts” and “ignorance of second causes”) are both consequences of the lack of rational skills. For, the first, comes from “not knowing that such apparitions are nothing else but creatures of the fancy” and, therefore, people “think [of them] to be real and external substances”; and the second, comes from the lack of scientific knowledge of the way that nature works. The forth “seed” (“taking of things casual for prognostics”) is an excess of faith, since it comes from believing either that because two things happened consecutively, the next time one happens the other will follow (especially concerning good fortune or ill success) or from “the like prognostics from other men of whom they have once conceived a good opinion”^[27] are true. In some sense, it can be said that Hobbes has a “solution” for these three causes of superstitious religion: natural reason and absence of faith in improbable causes or in other men. The third (“devotion towards what men fear”), however, has no antidote. It comes from the anxiety of not knowing the future. That is, fear of the end of things; fear of final goals; fear of death.

“…For as Prometheus (which, interpreted, is the prudent man) was bound to the hill Caucasus (a place of large prospect where an eagle, feeding on his liver, devoured in the day as much as was repaired in the night), so that man which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long gnawned on by fear for death, poverty, or other calamity, and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep”.^[28]

The three former causes are “unnatural”, because they are the consequence of the misuse of natural reason, but the latter is never accounted as induced by other man or by some sort of deceit. In some sense, it is understood as the natural cause for religion.

“And therefore, when there is nothing to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, either of their good or evil fortune, but some power or agent invisible; in which sense, perhaps, it was that some of the old poets said that the gods were at first created by human fear; which spoken of the gods (that is to say, of the many gods of the Gentiles) is very true”.^[29]

It is worth noticing that Hobbes points out constantly that he is describing the religion of the “Gentiles” and not Christianity. However, the punctualisation is necessary because in the description itself it is impossible to see the difference between them. In the description of the structure and goals of the Gentile religion it is more than easy to recognize the role of the Catholic Church -among others’- in Hobbes’ time. Even more, later in the Leviathan Hobbes’ denounces of the Church’s power will be almost the same as these first accounts of the Gentile religion.

So, then, what is the difference between Christianity and Gentile religion? There are two main differences that will structure his battle against the Church throughout the book. The first one is evident: Christianity is a monotheistic religion, whereas Gentile religion is polytheistic. This difference is essential, because Hobbes links monotheism with rationality while renders polytheism with fear.

”But the acknowledgement of one God, eternal, infinite, and omnipotent, may more easily be derived from the desire men have to know the causes of natural bodies, and their several virtues and operations, than from the fear of what was to behalf them in time to come. For he that from any affect he seeth come to pass should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and from thence to the cause of that cause, and plunge himself profoundly into the pursuit of causes, shall at last come to this: that there must be (as even the heathen philosophers confessed) one first mover, that is, a first and eternal cause of all things, which is men mean by the name of God; and all this without thought of their fortune, the solicitude whereof both inclines to fear and hinders them from the search of causes of other things; and thereby gives occasion of feigning of as many gods as there be men that feign them”. ^[30]

What this first difference states is that Christian religion itself does not work out fear. And this is essential because what will be challenged latter in the text by Hobbes is the “strategies” that churchmen undertake in order to make men obey them above kings’ power, but not Christianity as such. However, as we will see, fear of the future, of the absolute future, that is the afterlife, will still be an obstacle for the undermining of Church authority. For now, though, this is enough to see that Hobbes’ divides Christianity into two spheres: philosophical, reasonable faith, and fear of absolute future from which the Church obtains its power. The second difference between Christianity and Gentile religion stresses this point:

“For these seeds have received culture from two sorts of men. One sort have been they that have nourished and ordered them according to their own invention. The other have done it by god’s commandment and direction. But both sorts have done it with a purpose to make those men that relied on them the more apt to obedience, laws, peace, charity, and civil society.”^[31]

So the second difference is the origin of the law. The Gentile religion is a human invention, while Christianity is the work of God. Hobbes does not explain why Christian revelation is reliable and classical mythology is not. This lack of explanations led some of his contemporaries and other interpreters since then and hitherto to consider his relation to Christianity a fruit of convenience, as if he was a utilitarian in appearing as a Christian. Indeed, what is important here is the fact that both religions share goals. Their utility is the same. Their purpose is obedience, and this means that all religion -true or false- is, finally, politics:

“So that the religion of the former sort is a part of human politics, and teacheth part of the duty which earthly kings require of their subjects. And the religion of the latter sort is divine politics, and containeth precepts to those that have yielded themselves subjects in the kingdom of God”. ^[32]

Henceforth, in this first battle of reason versus superstition, Hobbes closes the circle in the concept of “divine politics”. The political side of Christianity demands that reason be a judge of the means necessary to attain the goal of peace and obedience. Two consequences are derived from this concept. The first one is that there is no separation of the so-called political side and the religious side. Thus, the “separation of Church and State” understood as the separation of the temporal power and the intemporal power makes no sense. Both are the same and pursue the same goal. There is but one single power. Finally, the difference between the two kinds of religion, and therefore, between the two kinds of politics, ends up merely being its origin: one is human, the other is divine.

“Of the former sort were all the founders of commonwealths and the lawgivers of the Gentiles; of the latter sort were Abraham, Moses, and our blessed Saviour, by whom have been derived unto us the laws of the kingdom of God”. ^[33]

A second consequence raises: since its is clear that Hobbes is doing here a treatise of “divine politics” (because he confesses to be a subject of the “kingdom of God”), the real question to which the Leviathan will answer appears: Who must behold the power that comes from God’s command?

“But where God himself by supernatural revelation planted religion, there he also made to himself a peculiar kingdom and gave laws, not only of behavior towards himself, but also towards one another; and thereby in the kingdom of God, the policy and laws civil are a part of religion; and therefore the distinction of temporal and spiritual domination hath there no place”.^[34]

We are now at the end of the first battle. If Abraham, Moses and Christ -and only these three- are the lawgivers of the Kingdom of God, as the founders of Gentile commonwealths were of their kingdoms and republics, then the “Kingdom of God” and its laws are as earthly -and as political- as those were. It matters the effect, not the origin. Moreover, popes, priests and even apostles are excluded as “lawgivers”. The divine law, as a political corpus, becomes open to interpretation from the “civil science”, that is, scientific reason. We can already see here the unification of religion and politics, of temporal and intemporal powers, through reason. With this essential step, Hobbes has introduced political reason into the Church’s laws, and with it, the “raison d’état”: he’s broken the monopoly of interpretation that churches had in respect to divine law. And he has defeated superstition and other strategies that maintained this side of the single power in Church’s hands. Besides the question of who must be the interpreter of the designs of God, only fear of the absolute future remains untouched.

II b. Second Battle: Unity versus division.

However, the adversary that Hobbes faces is not only the Catholic Church. The Church of Rome -as he calls it- is the most powerful of all, and since it’s the motherland for all other Christian churches, it works as a paradigm of the fight against religious power. But, in fact, reformation and the appearance of several churches and doctrines that apparently diminished Rome’s power, ended up debilitating the state. As we have said above, the main goal of Hobbes’ State Theory is peace. That is, the absence of civil war. The existence of diverse churches -and other independent powers- is one of the main causes of this war. Hence, in his fight, Hobbes needs to challenge not only one particular conception of religion, not only the primacy of institutional religion as such, but also the division that the co-existence of many churches causes in a commonwealth. Since there is only one single power, there must be just one interpretation of divine laws. That is, one religion within the commonwealth. There must not be various loyalties to various churches.

If we assume that religion is politics, then each church must have its own political interest, beyond the state’s interest. As Reinhardt Koselleck puts it: “Hobbes asks what causes civil warfare. Guiding him in this quest is the idea that the plans and interests of various individuals, parties and churches must be unmasked before one can detect the underlying common cause of civil war”.^[35] To attain the kind of unity that prevents civil war, it is then necessary to finish with diversity: “Politically, however, the monarchs strove to eliminate or neutralize all institutions with an independent base. Mercantilism, too, was an economic system subject to political planning and State guidance; similarly, religious and ecclesiastical questions were treated with an eye to their usefulness to the state”.^[36]

The question that remained from the first battle (“Who must behold the power that comes from God’s command?”) finds its answer in this searching of unity. A “neutral” authority must overcome the division in factions and sectarian religious parties. This need for an authority must have two characteristics. First, it must hold both sides of “divine politics”, and, second, it must be the only interpreter of God’s commands. This is the birth of the official cult: state religion.

But, which of the different interpretations of those commands must be official? Hobbes will say that it must be the one that does not contradict natural right and laws of reason. In his scheme, however, this means that politics -that is, the search for peace- rule over religion. In order to have peace, then, religion becomes subordinate to the “raison d’état”. In other words, as Leo Strauss affirms: “Hobbes’s personal attitude to positive religion was at all times the same: religion must serve the State and is to be esteemed or despised according to the services or disservices rendered to the State”.^[37]

While it has been shown that “the religious parties drew their energies from sources outside the domains of princely power”, and that, therefore, “the princes could not prevail over them unless they challenged the primacy of religion”^[38], it is also true that this “sources outside the domains of princely power” include the inner source, namely, conscience. If, after the first battle above described, the problem of fear of the absolute future remained unsolved, from this second battle, another question arises. How can this new “civic science” deal with conscience? This question is not answered yet, because although the process of unification can effectively overcome division “the state’s power, however, determines only the external cult”, and this is how “Hobbes laid the groundwork for separating the internal from the external”^[39] This new division will be a problem in his project of unification of all powers in the state, as we will see, and will ask for a conquest of the inner realm –this conquest will eventually fail, and as many commentators^[40] have already explained, this private inner realm will open the possibility to defeat the absolutist state. But, according to the Leviathan, Hobbes thinks that with this distinction of the external and the internal, the sovereign can control what really matters, that is, actions (that include public speech and public religion), while there is enough leaving thoughts in the private domain. This is a complete turn-around of the work of reformation, based on personal faith more than in external –”pharisaical”– actions and speeches, with which the Catholic Church trades. Reinhardt Koselleck stresses the political dimension of this division, and, in doing that, he reinforces the idea that what Hobbes is primarily pursuing is to empty the political side of religion, while leaving faith as something private, unable to affect the fate of the commonwealth:

“The separation of inward and external, as well as of convictions and actions, thus took on completely new historical meaning, as an allusive comparison with the Reformers makes clear. Luther’s separation of inward and external springs from his absolute consciousness of Revelation, his certainty that his inner being was separated from this world. And out of the inner necessity to proclaim the word of God, objectively audible in his conscience, he encroaches on the external. (…) Thus the secular realm is subjugated to the spiritual realm in which conscience plays a role; the commonwealth becomes the “educational institution of the Christian nation”, and this is “unthinkable without intolerance. Hobbes is “intolerant” for precisely the opposite reason. He endows the State with all its powers precisely in order to find protection against those prophets of revelation (Leviathan, I, 2, passim) who, unlike Luther, believe they can absorb the worldly office completely. In doing so, Hobbes excludes the religious inner realm specifically, so as to analyze it as a political factor”.^[41]

So Hobbes has fought the first battle by stating that reason is at the center of the work of interpreting the law of God, and has fought the second one by showing the necessity for a public -external- cult. The question of who must be the authority that interprets scriptures under the light of reason has been answered by subordinating religion to the peace and unity of the commonwealth. This has been possible thanks to the concept of “divine politics”, that makes clear the political side of religion -which is external- and reducing the matter of faith to a small, silent, inner realm. Although these two victories leave two casualties (the question of conscience and the problem of absolute fear of the future), they have transformed the problem of religious factions from a theological matter to a “civic science” problem.

III.c. Third Battle: Sovereign’s power versus Church’s power.

Notwithstanding this subordination of the inner faith to the external cult and the introduction of reason in the work of interpretation, a problem still remains to be solved: who must lead (and how) this public cult that is at the service of the entire commonwealth. Here comes the last battle of this fight, which is a combination of the former two.

The first step of this final battle is a direct attack on the Pope’s authority to judge and decide what is true and acceptable according to the Scriptures. Once Hobbes has shown that religion is political, and that reason is the tool to be used to know when this political side of religion is helping to achieve peace in the commonwealth, he needs to undermine the actual authority of priests, bishops and popes. To do so, he applies his political reason to the political side of the Church:

“…amongst the points by the church of Rome declared necessary for salvation, there be so many manifestly to the advantage of the Pope (and of his spiritual subjects residing in the territories of other Christian princes) that were it not for the mutual emulation of those princes, they might without war or trouble exclude all foreign authority as easily as it has been excluded in England. For who is there that does not see to whose benefit it conduceth to have it believed that a king hath not his authority from Christ unless a bishop crown him? That a king, if he be a priest, cannot marry? That whether a prince be born in lawful marriage or not must be judged by authority from Rome? That subjects may be freed from their allegiance, if by the court of Rome the king be judged heretic? That a king (as Chilperic of France) may be deposed by a pope (as Pope Zachary) for no cause, and his kingdom given to one of his subjects? That the clergy and regulars, in what country soever, shall be exempt from the jurisdiction of their king in cases criminal? Or who does not see to whose profit redound the fees of private masses and vails of purgatory, with other signs of private interest, enough to mortify the most lively faith if (as I said) the civil magistrate and custom did not more sustain it than any opinion they have of the sanctity, wisdom, or probity of their teachers? So that I may attribute all the changes of religion in the world to one and the same cause, and that is, unpleasing priests, and those not only amongst Catholics, but even that church that hath presumed most of reformation”.^[42]

This last passage expresses a conceptual inflexion point in the advancing of Hobbes towards the unification of all powers -secular and divine- in one single ruler’s hands. Indeed, a secular ruler. Actually, the Pope’s power is accounted by Hobbes as secular because it is political, the Pope just does not admit it, and pretends to behold and intemporal power, while intervening as a temporal ruler. The opening sentence of the passage shows this contrast: Hobbes compares the “the points by the church of Rome declared necessary for salvation”, which is a list of requisites to obtain an intemporal reward, with the fact that “there be so many manifestly to the advantage of the Pope (and of his spiritual subjects residing in the territories of other Christian princes)”, that is, requisites of private, temporal matter and benefit. Moreover, this sentence, by invoking salvation, already deals with one of the two casualties of the other two battles: fear of the absolute future, fear of not being saved, fear of hell.

Furthermore, the rest of this opening sentence also shows two more, essential things: “that were it not for the mutual emulation of those princes, they might without war or trouble exclude all foreign authority as easily as it has been excluded in England”. First, that “those princes” are responsible for this situation, that is, they already have the power to overthrow the Church. It is just because of their “tolerance” that the Church retains this other power. And, second, that it is easy to accomplish the overthrowing, namely, Hobbes’ entire project: “without war or trouble exclude all foreign authority”. “Foreign” means in Hobbes not only an authority from another, geographical country, namely, the Pope, but also all authorities based on a theoretical space outside the boundaries of the commonwealth’s covenant. And, if it was not sufficiently clear that Hobbes is not creating a sheer historical system, but answering to a timeless tension, proper of human beings, he says, to close the sentence, that to achieve success in this projects is as easy as it has been in England. So it can be (and must be) done everywhere else.

But, let us enumerate the 10 characteristics of Hobbes’s project already apparent in the rest of the passage:

a) “For who is there that does not see to whose benefit it conduceth to have it believed that a king hath not his authority from Christ unless a bishop crown him?”

First of all, a sentence that asks for whose benefiting is a sort of rational question that points to the consequences, not to the justification of actions. Quid podest? Second of all, the question clearly implies that a King must not have his authority from interested rulers of churches’ offices and their “human politics”; but this does not mean that the King shouldn’t have his authority from Christ -”divine politics”-.

b) “That a king, if he be a priest, cannot marry?”

Third, beyond the concrete norm about marriages among the clergy –an important issue in the work of reformation, no doubt– the question does not ask: “That a priest, if he be a King, cannot marry?” but rather, on the contrary, it suggests the possibility for a King to be a minister of God. That is: to be the interpreter of God’s command, and the Sheppard for both people’s faith and life.

c) “That subjects may be freed from their allegiance, if by the court of Rome the king be judged heretic?”

Fourth, indeed, the commonwealth is subjected by a covenant, and “allegiance”, between the citizens, individually and as a whole. Only they can break it or maintain it.

d) “That a king (as Chilperic of France) may be deposed by a pope (as Pope Zachary) for no cause, and his kingdom given to one of his subjects?”

Fifth, besides the historical evidence that here is provided to support the main claim, the inaccurate use of this “for no cause” is stressing the arbitrarily of the Pope’s rule. An arbitrariness that is not meant as a free use of the power at the ruler’s disposal, which is the essence of his authority, but the uncaused, ungrounded (neither in covenant nor in conquest), capricious, self-profitable decision-making process.

e) “That the clergy and regulars, in what country soever, shall be exempt from the jurisdiction of their king in cases criminal?”

Sixth, penal system must be entirely on the sovereign’s hands.

f) “Or who does not see to whose profit redound the fees of private masses and vails of purgatory, with other signs of private interest, enough to mortify the most lively faith if (as I said) the civil magistrate and custom did not more sustain it than any opinion they have of the sanctity, wisdom, or probity of their teachers?”

Seventh, the self-profitable use of “purgatory”, (again, the absolute future), by the Church is the cause for weak faiths. Eighth, apart from “civil power” (“those princes”) it is the contingent cultural environment –namely “custom”– that makes this situation possible. Ninth, as a reverse of the lacking virtues of the clergy “teachers”, priests, bishops and popes are, actually, sinful, ignorant and untrustworthy.

g) “So that I may attribute all the changes of religion in the world to one and the same cause, and that is, unpleasing priests, and those not only amongst Catholics, but even that church that hath presumed most of reformation”.

And, tenth, “unpleasing priests” from all churches, with their “human politics” are to blame not only for division within the commonwealth, but also for the decadence of religion itself. Thus, the corollary is clear. First premise: in order for peace to be there must be one single public religion. Second premise: Of the two possible leaders of such a religion, namely the Pope/priests and the sovereign, the former is corrupt and causes division and war. Corollary: The sovereign must be the head of the public church and the interpreter of Scriptures. According to Leo Strauss, Hobbes’s thought evolved in this matter, and this, his final opinion about it, opened the door for his own interpretation of Scripture:

“The fundamental question: On what authority does one believe that Scripture is the word of God? Is differently answered in different presentations. In the Elements: On the authority of the Church, the successors of the Apostles. In De Cive: Not on the authority of the Church, but on that of Jesus. In the Leviathan: On the authority of the teachers whose teaching is permitted and organized by the sovereign power, i.e. one confesses verbally -for thoughts are free- that Scripture is the word of God, because secular authority commands this confession”.^[43]

The church obtains his authority from Scripture; therefore, beyond denouncing its corruption, Hobbes needs to challenge the content of that grounding. Through this long fight Hobbes has acquired his tools: reason, raison d’état, public cult and sovereign’s interpretative authority of the Divine Law. All of them are “formal” tools, so to speak, and with them, he will build up a system of government adding the “matter” of religion to the political matter of all states.

Through the interpretation of the content of Scriptures the dilemma between obedience to God and obedience to the sovereign must be reduced ad absurdum and the problem of conscience and the problem of fear of the absolute future must be solved:

“That the condition of mere nature (that is to say, of absolute liberty, such as theirs that neither are sovereigns nor subjects) is anarchy, and the condition of war; that the precepts by which men are guided to avoid that condition are the laws of nature; that a commonwealth without sovereign power is but a word without substance, and cannot stand; that subjects owe to sovereigns simple obedience in all things wherein their obedience is not repugnant to the laws of God, I have sufficiently proved in that which I have already written. There wants only, for the entire knowledge of the civil duty, to know what are those laws of God. For without that a man knows not, when he is commanded anything by the civil power, whether it be contrary to the law of God, or not, and so, either by too much civil obedience offends the Divine Majesty, or through fear of offending God transgresses the commandments of the commonwealth. To avoid both these rocks, it is necessary to know what are the laws divine”.^[44]

IV

Interpreting Scriptures (Redefining Christianity)

Hobbes interprets the Scriptures at various junctures in the Leviathan. Actually, the third and fourth parts of the book are entirely -and constantly- grounded in Scripture. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus my attention on the first eight chapters of part three (from chapter XXXII to chapter XXXIX). These chapters mark the beginning of his interpretation of Scriptures. Although in the fourth part of the book Hobbes focuses his attention on the Churches’ self-interest in its interpretation of Scriptures, it is in these first eight chapters that he develops the core of his understanding of the “Word of God” and his strategies grounded in the power that God’s Word gives to those who decide its meaning.

In the first 8 chapters of Part Three of the Leviathan Hobbes attempts to prove that the Commonwealth he has described in the previous sections is not opposed to Christianity or to God’s will. On the contrary, he argues that the uncontestable authority of the Church is opposed, not only to the interests and survival of the Commonwealth, but, moreover, to the meaning of Holy Scripture and God himself. Thus Hobbes’ project is compatible with, and in fact derived from, the essence of Christianity.

While he emphasizes the sovereign’s arbitrating power in matters concerning religion, he will also delineate the duty of his subjects, if they are to be both good citizens and good Christians. He does this by arguing for the identity of these two behaviors: Being a good citizen in the Hobbesian commonwealth is exactly the same as being a good Christian. He reinterprets Christianity to secure the power of the sovereign, robbing it from those (e.g. the priests and the Pope) who would invoke it against the Sovereign’s authority. At the end of the first 8 chapters, he writes:

“The maintenance of civil society depending on justice, and justice on the power of life and death (and other less rewards and punishments) residing in them that have the sovereignty of the commonwealth, it is impossible a commonwealth should stand where any other that the sovereign has the power of giving greater rewards than life, and of inflicting greater punishments than death.”^[45]

So, how can he overcome this great challenge to the power of the sovereign? How will he secure the commonwealth? Hobbes’s strategy is to highlight the aspects of Papal doctrine that concern salvation and then invert their meaning to buttress his state theory. Each of the 8 chapters corresponds to a singular aspect of the Church. Hobbes considers these aspects in their essentially to be a constitutive role for the Church’s supernatural authority. All of them put together form a a succinct definition of the Church: the basis for the Church’s authority is irrational; it identifies itself as the sole authorized interpreter of Scriptures; as the spiritual lord (inspired by God) of an atemporal realm; as the holy benefactor of sacraments; as the prophetic and miraculous agent of God; and the only path to salvation and eternal life.

We see a certain repetition at the level of method in Hobbes’ task of modifying the ideological foundation of the Church. Throughout his analysis, he begins by defining a given attribute of the Church. He considers it from the point of view of popular understanding and also from the point of view of the Church’s own self-definition. This is what I call “traditional” or “first” definition of an attribute. Then, he exposes what Scripture says about that particular attribute (“miracles”, “sacraments”, “inspiration”, and so on). Under the light of the literal meaning of each attribute, he shows that what Scriptures say about them is not alien to rationality, and he compares this rational account of a certain attribute with what the Church says about it. Once he has compared this textual definition with the “traditional” or “first” interpretation, he puts forth a new, ¨Hobbesian¨ definition of the Church’s attributes. This new or “second” definition is always compatible with his idea of commonwealth, destroys Church’s authority, and strengthens that of the sovereign. His “second” definitions are always secular, and all of them are aimed at the most powerful attribute of the Church, that is, control over salvation. But, in order to get to the secularization of salvation, and, hence, of hell, he must follow a particular order. First, he removes Scripture from the Church’s hands, on the basis of what is found in Scripture itself. To do so, he empties the meaning of terms like “prophet” and “word of God”; both used to buttress the authority of church’s interpreters. Once the Church is stripped of the power of the word, Hobbes secularizes all what was once considered supernatural: the idea of “spirit”, the nature of angels and even the Kingdom of God, the linchpin for the Church’s authority and their monopolization of the notions of heaven and hell. The last step will be a re-definition of salvation and condemnation along the lines of the secularization of hell. I will treat this last development in a separate section in this paper.

1. Taking the Word Away

In Chapters XXXII, XXXIII and XXXIV of the third part of the Leviathan Hobbes effectively strips the power of the word of God from ecclesiastical interpreters. In earlier sections of the Leviathan we have seen how Hobbes’s conception of the commonwealth excludes any sharing of power between the state and the church. But, now, he needs something more. He needs to vacuate the Church of every last bit of authority, especially, that ¨bit¨ of authority that licenses the church to determine the afterlife. Hobbes realizes that Scripture is the principal source for its authority. Thus it is no surprise that he embraces Scripture. He then reinterprets it in relation to his theory of the state, and finally, he finally claims that in case of doubt only civil authority has the authority to arbitrate between conflicting interpretations.

The interpretation of Scripture that Hobbes undertakes is based on three strategies^[46]. The first is the ¨deference¨ to Scripture (“the ground of my discourse must be, not only the natural word of God, but also the prophetical”^[47]); second, reason (“We are not to renounce our sense and experience, nor [that which is the undoubted word of God] our natural reason”^[48]); and third, the justification of obedience to, and only to, the sovereign (“But by captivity of our understanding is not meant a submission of the intellectual faculty to the opinion of any other man, but of the will to obedience^[49], where obedience is due”^[50]). That is: although we accept the primacy of Scripture over reason, from this it is not implied that we ought to accept the primacy of any other man as an interpreter of them, except for the sovereign. However, here Hobbes faces the first obstacle in his purpose of vacuating the Church’s authority. As long as Scripture is assumed to be the prophetic Word, what the Church says about it can be -and was- understood as prophetic as well. Hobbes asks: who else but the sovereign possesses validity for our trust in him qua interpreter?^[51]. And he answers: This man would be a true prophet. But how can we know that a man is a true prophet?

The signs that Scripture provides to recognize a true prophet are, according to Hobbes: a) that he teaches the established religion and b) he performs miracles. Hobbes claims here that because the age of miracles is passed, the only sign we have to acknowledge the Prophetic law of God is the Holy Scripture.^[52] This clears the way for him to incorporate Scripture into his project. Once the borders of the text are fixed, that is, once no further “prophetic word” can be added, neither from revelation nor as a prophetic interpretation, then reason can be applied to comb every corner of the Old and the New Testament for the consolidation of the sovereign’s power.

In the first condition for a genuine prophet that he states (a) we see the first instance of the process of secularization. As we have witnessed, what Hobbes understands by established religion is what the sovereign says it is. So, what was understood as an inspired, supernatural gift of predicting the future, as speaking in the name of God and as the ability to perform miracles is reduced to the teaching of what the civil power understands as convenient for the peace of the commonwealth. It is worth noticing that he makes use of a certain parallelism between God and the sovereign to justify this claim: “For these words, ‘revolt from the Lord your God’, (that we find in the Deuteronomy) are in this place equivalent to “revolt from your King”^[53]. This first secularization is exemplary: what begins by turning some divine power into a human task, ends up divinely ¨metaphorizing¨ the sovereign’s own attributes.

Notwithstanding the secularization of prophecy, the Church remains the best suited to be the authoritative interpreter of Scripture^[54]. The Church decides on both the validity of the scripturual texts (which are to be included in the Book) and their meaning. Hobbes will solve this problem politically by asking: what is the nature of the power of the ¨well-suited¨ authority over the interpretation of Scripture? Hobbes understands Scripture as a source of (regulated) submissiveness: “In sum, the histories and prophecies of the Old Testament, and the gospels and epistles of the New Testament, have had one and the same scope, to convert men to the obedience of God”^[55]. Therefore the important thing is to determine who is the representative of God on earth, in order to determine to whom we must submit.^[56] God speaks to humanity, and from His word authorizations and prohibition are given. Sometimes God speaks to one man, other times he speaks to humanity. In the former case, His word is private, in the latter, it is public. If its private, it only binds he to whom God has decided to reveal his will, because private inspirations -since they are subjective evidences- cannot be imposed on all. If the validity of evidence is subjective, we run the risk of falling prey to false prophets. On the other hand, His public “Word” gives authority either to the Commonwealth or the Church. To decide which one possesses the authority, once the prophetic ground has been discarded as private, only the value of their public actions and political nature must be considered, because both of them are earthly powers. But in order for any Institution to hold authority over a number of men and act on their behalf, it needs to be a “person” (as “person” is understood in Hobbes’ legal theory of “author” and “person”).

One the one hand, If the Church was a person, it would be exactly the same as a Commonwealth of Christians, called “commonwealth” because it is formed by men united in one person, namely the sovereign, and called “of Christians” because it is formed by men, united under a Christian sovereign. If the Church was a commonwealth, then, all Christian kings and their states would be considered particular persons, and they would be subjects susceptible of being judged, deposed or punished by the universal sovereign governing Christendom. Consequently, the question of the authority of the Holy Scripture is this: whether all Christian kings, and the sovereign assemblies in Christian Commonwealths, are absolute in their own territories, immediately under God, or whether they are subjects to the Vicar of Christ, constituted over the universal church, and thus can be judged, condemned, deposed and killed in the manner that the Vicar deems opportune or necessary for the common good.^[57] However, the Church is not a “person” because it does not have a covenant conferring on it the title of “author” over its Christian subjects. In this sense, it has no authority at all. It cannot command or perform any action whatsoever in the name of any number of men, nor is it capable of having any power, nor right to anything. It has no will, no reason, no voice, because all these things are personal. Therefore, if the whole of Christians are not united in a commonwealth, they are not a person, nor is there such a thing as a universal church with authority over them and, hence, the Scriptures are not laws for the universal church.

On the other hand, if the first “traditional” definition of authority simply involved interpretation of Scripture by the Church, Hobbes has now provided his second definition: authority over scriptural interpretation entails authority over the commonwealth and its laws. In the case of disagreement between the church and the sovereign of the commonwealth over the interpretation of Scriptures, citizens are left with no recourse to determine which is in accordance with God’s will, namely, peace and justice. But “peace and justice” are exactly the content of the law and it was exactly because of this kind of discord that the commonwealth came to be in the first place. The Christian commonwealth has already in its nature the warrant to be the interpreter of God’s will :

“But the question is not of obedience to God (this is out of dispute) but of when and what God hath said, which to subjects that have no supernatural revelation cannot be known but by that natural reason which guided them, for the obtaining of peace and justice, to obey the authority of their several commonwealth (that is to say, of their lawful sovereign).” ^[58]

Coherently, even the question about which corpus is valid for interpretation corresponds to the sovereign, as well as the submission that the true interpreter deserves as the representative of God: “According to this obligation, I can acknowledge no other books of the Old Testament to be Holy Scripture but those which have been commanded to be acknowledged for such by the authority of the Church of England.”^[59]

The first step has hereby been completed. The power of the Holy Word has been removed from the Church by denying its prophetic power, by showing that the Scriptures themselves do not command to take for truth what the Church say about them, by denouncing -as previously shown- its untrustworthiness; but, most importantly, because, once the only problem that remains is disagreement over the question of justice and the best way to achieve peace, the problem reveals itself as being just a rethorical question: how could the subjects authorize the Church if they have already made a covenant (i.e. the Commonwealth) to solve those kinds of questions?

Because Scriptures are now authoritative, “It is necessary before I proceed any further,’’ says Hobbes, ‘’to determine out of the Bible the meaning of such words as by their ambiguity may render what I am to infer upon them obscure or disputable.”^[60]

2. Against all supernatural

In chapters XXXV, XXXVI and XXXVII of the third part of the Leviathan, Hobbes argues against divine inspiration as the ground for the Church’s legitimacy, against the authority of visions, against the possibility for the sovereign to be contradicted (even by an angel), against the authority obtained from that which is called “spirit”, against the idea of an intemporal Kingdom of God, against the common understanding of the words “sacred” and “sacrament”, and against the use of the word “miracle” to ground religious rituals such as the Eucharist. All of these challenges are textually supported in Scripture and aim at one and only one thing: the primarily supernatural reference for the justification of the Church’s authority.

Hobbes’ argument^[61] begins with the words “body” and “spirit”: “which in the language of the Schools are termed substances, corporeal and incorporeal.”^[62] It proceeds by way of demonstrating the impossibility of incorporeal substance. He goes on to conclude that spirits and angels are either corporeal or they do not exist at all. First definition of spirit: “So that the proper signification of spirit in common speech, is either a subtle, fluid, and invisible body, or a ghost idol or phantasm of the imagination”.^[63] He subsequently goes on to describe the various meanings of “spirit” in Scripture, in order to show that it is impossible for the Church to utilize its alleged spiritual (supernatural) nature to claim authority over civil matters. Hobbes finds six meanings of “spirit” in Scriptures: First, the spirit of God taken for a wind or breath. Second, extraordinary gifts of the understanding. Third, extraordinary affections. Fourth, the gift of prediction by dreams or visions. Fifth, life. Sixth, used as means to achieve subordination to authority. Given this six meanings, Hobbes offers a new and proper definition: “The word spirit in the text signifieth no such thing (Ghost), but either properly a real substance, or metaphorically some extraordinary ability or affection of the mind or the body”.^[64]

What is common to all these determinations of spirit is that they are either totally excluded from priests and other churchmen in their literal meaning or they are accessible universally, to all men, in their metaphorical meaning. Thus, the “spiritual authority” is dismantled, and not in a minor way: the corporeality of spirit establishes a pattern for the continuing process of dismantling Church’s doctrine. This pattern consists in making terrestrial what putatively belonged to heaven alone: a spirit is in reality a body. Hobbes pursues the same approach in his ‘‘scriptural’’ interpretation of angels. The first definition is: an angel is a messenger of God and a kind of ghost. It follows that they too cannot be incorporeal, because incorporeal substance is an absurdity. After analyzing what scripture says about angels, and especially about the space they occupy and the physical movement they perform he concludes: “Angels, therefore, are not thence proved to be incorporeal”,^[65]and also: “it proves the permanence of angelical nature, it confirmeth also their materiality”.^[66] Why is it important, after all, (for Hobbes) that angels be corporeal? First, because it negates the incorporeal spiritual power on earth, that is, the possibility of incognizable and irrational things that rule over men; and second, because this second definition of angels as corporeal allows Hobbes to establish a comparison between angels and men: “But in the resurrection man shall be permanent, and not incorporeal, so therefore, also are angels”. There is nothing unusual or supernatural in angels then, nothing “more than” or “more powerful” than human beings. Once more, Hobbes renders something divine in nature earthly and human.

Moreover, all these materialist conceptions of supernatural beings lead him to deny the power of inspiration. Its literal meaning is (first definition): “blowing into a man some thin and subtle air or wind”^[67]. But in Scripture –once reason is used to interpret it– the reader realizes that it is used only metaphorically: sometimes it means “life” and sometimes it means that “God inclined the spirit or mind of those writers to write that which should be useful in teaching, reproving, correcting, and instructing men in the way of righteous living”^[68] Therefore, inspiration is not essentially a property of the Church, that is, it does not fall within its monopoly. On the contrary: it is available to all men if God wants and, above all, it leads to the education of men, so they can live righteously: that is, again, a duty of educators authorized by the sovereign.

However, at the center of the Church’s supernaturalism is the claim that the Church is the earthly ambassador of the kingdom of God.^[69]. This claim is supernatural insofar as the Kingdom of God is conceived as a non-physical, non-temporal realm over which the Church rules. It is a kingdom with subjects (souls), an army (angels), judges (clergymen), currency (bulls), regent (the Holy Pope), embassies (cathedrals), sovereign (God), “raison d’état” (sacred), rewards (heaven) and punishments (hell). All these attributes of the Kingdom of God are supernatural in some sense. All of them are universal. All of them are based on a power superior to the commonwealth’s attributes. The notion of the Kingdom of God is the main argument put forth by religious men to justify the existence and the role of the Church in the world. And it is the argument most disputed by all sides since the late middle ages when it comes to clarifying the meaning and form of politics and ethics.

As Quentin Skinner has shown, the humanists used the discoveries they made when they began to translate antique documents and speeches, more than a century before Hobbes’s Leviathan, to demonstrate that some of the practices and jurisdictions of the Church were derived from the political configuration of the Roman Empire and that they represented self-serving interpretations of its laws. The revival of republicanism is also linked with the discovery of the virtues of the roman republic against the vices of the imperial period. ^[70]In the same way, some imperial ambitions and their juridical and philosophical assumptions were fought with the help of the classical republican values, as Machiavelli did in his Discourses. While at the beginning of this ideological and actual battle the Church seemed to be an ally for the new republican forces, soon enough the new philosophical and juridical corpus became and enemy for most the Church’s terrenial actions. The work of reformation was also a variation of this melody spread around Europe, although with different lyrics.

The definition of this Kingdom of God, its boundaries and its legitimacy became an essential quest for all sides. The coexistence of heavenly (atemporal) power side by side a temporal one was widely discussed. However, while practices in the secular realm and the corruptions of the Church were criticized and vilified by humanists, reformists and officials, the existence and supernatural reality of the Kingdom of God was not questioned, only its effects were scrutinized. Hobbes’ œuvre consists in the same tone only with different lyrics and a sharper pitch. The problem for Hobbes is not how to delimit the frontiers of this godly realm, but rather only the calculation of which power is greater. Once it is recognized that a supernatural thing will always be greater than a natural one, he must get rid of the prefix “super”. It is not enough to prevent the encroachment of the supernatural kingdom because it is impossible to circumscribe. Hence Hobbes’ position must consist in negating the existence of such a supernatural commonwealth beyond the natural commonwealth, and transferring the effects of its power to the new Mortal God, that is, the sovereign. As Carl Schmitt (following Leo Strauss) says:

“The distinction between the secular and the spiritual power was, according to Hobbes, alien to the heathens because religion was to them a part of politics; the Jews brought about unity from the side of religion. Only the Roman papal church and the power-thirsty Presbyterian churches or sects thrive on the state-destroying separation of the spiritual and the secular power. Superstition and misuse of alien beliefs in spirits arising from fear and illusion have destroyed the original and natural heathen unity of politics and religion. The struggle to overcome the Roman papal church’s division between the “Kingdom of Light” and the “Kingdom of Darkness” -that is, the restoration of the original unity–is, as Leo Strauss ascertained, the actual meaning of Hobbes’ political theory”. ^[71]

But, what is, then, the such called “Kingdom of God” if not a spiritual kingdom? Of all the meanings that “Kingdom of God” had, Hobbes explicitly asserts that the one used by the Church as a means to obtain political power is: “The Kingdom of God in the writings of divines, and specially in sermons and treatises of devotions, [that is, including reformed churches] is taken most commonly for eternal felicity after this life, in the highest heaven”.^[72] But, its literal meaning is rather mundane:

“I find the Kingdom of God to signify in most places of Scripture, a kingdom properly so named, constituted by votes of the people of Israel in peculiar manner, wherein they chose God for their king by covenant made with him, upon God’s promising them the possession of the land of Canaan”. ^[73]

It is worth pointing out that Hobbes does not deny the existence of heaven itself, nor an ever-happy afterlife. But, his eschatology differs from that of the church in the spiritual or ghostly nature of that future heaven: heaven –as will be shown– is on earth, and in arguing this Hobbes will complete the secularization of the after-life; but we are not yet there. Hitherto, Hobbes only denies the connection between the church and that Kingdom of Heaven, of which the concept of atemporal power, or “Kingdom of God” was the most important argument. Then, if the Kingdom of God was an historical kingdom, two questions must be answered. First, what historical period do Hobbes and his contemporaries belong to, and, second, how was that Kingdom of God actually organized, and what can we learn about it, considering that God Himself established it? The kingdom of God that was established with the people of Israel is over, and the Kingdom of God that will come with redemption, resurrection, under the rule of Christ Himself in his second coming has yet to arrive. So we live in a kind of a historical in-between. Christ came to teach us how to prepair for the just kingdom that shall come with his second coming. In the meantime people have only to accept that He is the Lord, the Son of God. A close reading of the Scriptures teaches us that even that Kingdom of God that came due to the covenant of the people of Israel was the type of commonwealth in which the office of sovereign and the office of the high priest were united.^[74] Abraham and Moses, as paradigms of it, were both the sovereign and the high priest, and when that was not the case, the office of the high priest was ministerial to the sovereign, not magisterial.^[75]As Laurence Berns points out:

“Again, only Moses, as civil sovereign under God, was called up to God, not Aaron, the chief priest, nor any other priest, nor the aristocracy of seventy elders, nor the people. By Moses throwing over the calf made by Aaron, and by Moses’ control of those who prophesied in the camp, it was shown that all priests and prophets in a Christian commonwealth derive their authority from the approval and authority of the sovereign”. ^[76]

According to the example of that past Kingdom of God, and considering that we live in the meantime before Christ’s return, people must accept the authority of the sovereign instead of the false testimony of the Church when it intends to rule over civil sovereigns. “From all this is clear that the distinction between spiritual and temporal government is false. All government in this life, both of the state and of the religion, is temporal and under the command of one civil sovereign”. ^[77] Only three supernatural assets remain then and their secularization will fall dramatically: the concept of “holy” or “sacred”, the meaning of “sacrament”, and the nature and validity of miracles in this meantime. What is understood by “holy” or “sacred”, i.e. “of God”, must be now understood as “public “or “of the sovereign”, because the sovereign is God’s representative on earth, both as head of the government and head of the public religion. Equally, the Church’s business –that is, sacraments– are not a magic thing that only “divines” can provide. In Scriptures we can only find two sacraments prescribed: baptism (that substituted circumcision) and Eucharist.

Both are solemn oaths that we make as a sign of our allegiance to God, that is, a form of covenant or as a remembrance of it: “Sacrament is a separation of some visible thing from common use, and a consecration of it to God’s service, for a sign either of our admission into the Kingdom of God (to be of the number of his peculiar people) or for a commemoration of the same”.^[78]

Finally^[79], the last asset that remains, before we consider salvation, is the power to make and sanction miracles. Miracles are dangerous because they cause admiration, and suspend reason. Therefore, they must be “rare” and with “no natural cause known”. But to believe something against reason is almost against the will of God: reason is what He has given us to understand His law and works. So why should any miracle exist at all?

“It belongeth to the nature of miracle that it be wrought for the procuring of credit to God’s messengers, ministers, and prophets, that hereby men may know that are called, sent, and employed by God, and thereby be the better inclined to obey them.(…) A Miracle is a work of God (besides his operation by the way of nature, ordained in the creation), done for the making manifest to his elect the mission of an extraordinary minister for their salvation”^[80]

However, this irrational nature of the belief in miracles makes them especially dangerous, because men are easy to deceive. It would be too easy for a false prophet to deceive people through false wonders and tricks, in order to gain authority over them. Caution is necessary. Reason must ask for its own exhaustion: “we must see it done, and use all means possible to consider whether it be really done”^[81], but, more importantly, only the competent authority can decide if a miracle is real or false: “And in this also we must have recourse to God’s lieutenant, to whom in all doubtful cases, we have submitted our private judgements”.

In giving authority to the sovereign beyond private opinion on miracles, in emptying the supernatural nature of all “sacred” and of all sacraments, Hobbes has turned them into a ridiculous, meaningless dance of rituals, unless they are prescribed by the sovereign, in which case they are political means to achieve peace and justice. Eucharist is the main target here:

“For example, if a man pretendeth that after certain words spoken over a piece of bread, that presently God hath made it not bread, but a god or a man (or both), and nevertheless it looketh still as like bread as ever it did, there is no reason for any man to think it really done, nor consequently to fear him, till he enquire of God, but his vicar or lieutenant, whether it be done or not”. ^[82]

Finally, the reason by which this essential truths are not known is, according to Hobbes, a sort of conspiracy. Some “divines” want the power of the kings: “There be so many other places that confirm this interpretation that it were a wonder there is no greater notice taken of it, but that it gives too much light to Christian kings to see their right of ecclesiastical government”^[83].

V

The Secularization of Hell

The last step^[84] in granting absolute power to the sovereign consists in answering the question that remains open since Hobbes described his concept of fear in the first and second parts of the Leviathan. Fear is the most powerful passion. Reason also has an important place, but when it collides with fear, fear is always the stronger. Fear of violent death in the state of nature is what leads men, in the first place, to form a covenant and create the commonwealth. Fear of a common power, that is, fear of the sovereign, is what makes men obey a common law, guaranteeing peace in the commonwealth. As we discussed above, in order for these two fears to work it is necessary that there be no fears that eclipse:

“The maintenance of civil society depending on justice, and justice on the power of life and death (and other less rewards and punishments) residing in them that have the sovereignty of the commonwealth, it is impossible a commonwealth should stand where any other than the sovereign hath a power of giving greater rewards than life, and of inflicting greater punishments than death.”^[85]

Hobbes is here referring to eternal reward and punishment. Thus, he needs to find a way out of this problem. He needs to redefine these two incentives, and grant their power to the sovereign. As in the previous chapters he will do it by reinterpreting Scripture:

“Now seeing eternal life is a greater reward than life present, and eternal torment a greater punishment than the death of nature, it is a thing worthy to be well considered, of all men that desire (by obeying authority) to avoid the calamities of confusion and civil war, what is meant in Holy Scripture by life eternal and torment eternal; and for what offences, and against whom committed, men are to be eternally tormented; and for what actions they are to obtain eternal life”.^[86]

Continuing his argument about the Kingdom of God, Hobbes states that “life eternal” is to be on earth, not in the upper place called “heaven”. The paradise of eternal happiness is not “coelum empyreum”, “the highest heaven”:

“…seeing it hath been already proved out of divers evident places of Scriptures (…) that the Kingdom of God is a civil commonwealth, where God himself is sovereign, by virtue of the Old and since of the New covenant, wherein he reigneth by his vicar or lieutenant, the same places do therefore also prove that after the coming again of our Saviour, in his majesty and glory, to reign actually and eternally, the kingdom of God is to be on earth”. ^[87]

To prove this, Hobbes uses two new arguments, besides what he has already stated about the Kingdom of God. The first one comes out of an analysis of Adam’s paradise in the Scripture. The second one is an analysis of the world to come in Scripture.

Adam possessed eternal life thanks to the tree of life and became mortal due to his disobedience when he tasted the fruit of the tree of good and evil.^[88] However, according to Hobbes, Adam was not condemned to death, a fact which can be inferred from his giving rise to offspring. Adam’s paradise was an earthly paradise, not in heaven, and his condemnation consisted in the certainty of a future death, and a life of misery and unhappiness. From this, Hobbes deduces that what we have lost and what we will recover, namely paradise, are eternal life and happiness, rather than a place. On the other hand, the world to come, that is, salvation, will be brought by Jesus in the Second Coming. He will reign as sovereign, and will establish a commonwealth with the faithful as His subjects. Jesus will resurrect all men, and will grant to the faithful eternal life under His command, and they will all be eternally happy. Resurrection does not mean that all the faithful will ascend to heaven, but rather that everyone will recover their life and their body. Some of them will be condemned to hell, while the others will remain forever subjects. Hobbes provides many examples of this in Scripture both negative: “That the place wherein men are to live eternally after resurrection is the heavens (…) is not easy to be drawn from any text that I can find.”^[89] …and positive:

“And this differs nothing from what that which two men in white clothing (that is, the two angels) said to the apostles that were looking upon Christ ascending (Acts 1:11) ‘This same Jesus, who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come as you have seen him go up into heaven’, which soundeth as if they had said he should come down to govern them under his Father, eternally here, and not take them up to govern them in heaven, and is conformable to the restoration of the Kingdom of God instituted under Moses, which was a political government of the Jews on earth”.^[90]

All of them leading to the same conclusion:

“And when our Saviour Christ [returns] (…) then shall there be a new kingdom of heaven, because our king shall then be God, whose throne is heaven, without necessity evident in the Scripture, that man shall ascend to his happiness any higher than God’s footstool, the earth”. ^[91]

Once heaven has been placed on earth, Hobbes has solved the first part of the problem: there is no greater reward than life on earth, because heaven means precisely life on earth, though eternal. From this it is impossible to see any difference between a fulfilling, peaceful life in the present and the promise of the kingdom of God, except for its duration. The second part of the problem, however, is more difficult to solve. The threat of an eternal punishment will always be greater than a temporary period of pain and simple death. Hobbes, then, will discuss not only Hell as place, he will also describe the nature of torment, with the purpose of assimilating it to the threat of punishment that the sovereign holds over his subjects.

Concerning Hell understood as place, Hobbes states, “As the kingdom of God and eternal life, so also God’s enemies and their torments after judgment appear by the Scripture to have their place on earth”^[92]. Following his method, Hobbes moves on to discuss the traditional understanding of hell, that is, the traditional confusion. All the traditional characterizations of hell that Hobbes finds in Scripture correspond to a place: “inferno” is underground; where “the congregation of Giants” is underwater; “utter darkness”, a place without God; “Gehnma and Tophed”, a place outside Jerusalem where garbage was burned, that is, a pyre. But from these divergences in Scripture, “it followeth, me thinks, very necessarily that that which is thus said concerning hell fire is spoken metaphorically, and that therefore there is a proper sense to be enquired after.”^[93]

At this point in Hobbes’ argument, hell has not yet been secularized. If Hobbes had merely modified the traditional notions of heaven and hell by showing that their place was on earth, without modifying their atemporal status–i.e., eternal reward and eternal punishment–the problem would remain unresolved, and I would not claim that the Leviathan presents a complete secularization of hell. But the inquiry that Hobbes requires at the end of the last passage quoted will lead him to a conclusion that will provide both a solution to the problem of the greatest fear, that is, fear of the absolute future, and a complete secularization of hell.

What does secularization mean in this context? It means turning what was non-terrestial into terrestrial (as we have seen: heaven into earth), turning what was atemporal into temporal and turning what was once supernatural into natural, thus creating a new structure of high and low, great and small, best and worst that produces new conditions of belief to ground how we conceive life and truth, including politics, ethics, and natural sciences.

The temporal nature of this new conception of hell (and heaven) has two characteristics. First, it is a historical time. The moment of punishment will be a historical moment shared by all humanity, once God resurrect us. But, above all, the temporal nature of hell is expressed by the transformation of eternal torture in an “estate” of mind and body rather than a place: “The fire prepared for the wicked is an everlasting fire, that is to say, the estate wherein no man can be without torture^[94], both of body and mind, after the resurrection, shall endure for ever”.

This state, apparently, arrives after the second coming of Christ. However, the way this “estate” is described, including its causes and agents, makes this state conceivable, even possible, in the present time, the time in between the First and the Second Coming. Continuing with this naturalization of hell, Hobbes addresses the question of the “tormenters”. Their names as they appear in the Bible have literal meaning: “Satan” means enemy, “Diabolus” means accuser, and “Abaddon” means destroyer. The fact that they have not been translated along with the rest of the Bible makes people think that they are invisible ghosts or forces, like the “demons” of the gentile religions, instead of what they really are:

“And because by the Enemy, the Accuser, and Destroyer, is meant the enemy of them that shall be in the kingdom of God, therefore, if the kingdom of God after the resurrection be upon earth (…), the Enemy and his kingdom must be on earth also. For so also was it in the time before the Jews had deposed God. For God’s kingdom was in Palestine, and the nations round about were the kingdoms of the Enemy; and consequently, by Satan is meant any earthly enemy of the Church”.^[95]

From all this, it is clear that what was usually understood by the Prince of Darkness, that is, a fallen angel with his own domain -hell- where he directs a set of tortures to the condemned, is, in Hobbes’ explanation, not a proper name but a common name that refers to all enemies of the Kingdom of God and the Church. The enemies, destroyers and accusers of the Christian commonwealth are the agents of hell on earth, both present and future. Notwithstanding this naturalization and temporalization of Satan himself, what really challenges the supposed atemporality of hell is Hobbes’ description of its sufferings and tortures.

“The torments of hell are expressed [in Scripture] sometimes by weeping and gnashing of teeth (…), sometimes by the worm of conscience (…), sometimes by fire (…), sometimes by “shame and contempt” (…). All which places design metaphorically a grief and discontent of mind, from the sight of that eternal felicity in others which they themselves through their own incredulity and disobedience have lost. And because such felicity in others is not sensible but by comparison with their own actual miseries, it followeth that they are to suffer such bodily pains and calamities as are incident to those who not only live under evil and cruel governors, but have also for enemy the eternal king of saints, God Almighty”^[96].

The state of hell is a psychological state of discontent caused by comparing the happy life of the “elected” with the tortured life of the faithless and disobedient. The definition of the torments fits in perfectly with two other moments of Hobbes’ state theory. First, the disobedience of civil law, that leads to punishment at the hands of the sovereign: misery and calamities are both effects of the punishments of the sovereign. Second, the state of war, or the state of nature, is precisely a state of grief and misery, plus the fear of imminent death. However, one could claim that at least these two moments of “hell on earth” are transient and eventually come to an end when the commonwealth is established, or when punishment subsides (including the moment of death, especially if one is a good Christian awaiting resurrection and salvation). The torments of hell, on the other hand, are eternal, and thus remain a source of greater fear than any threat that might come from the state of war or the sovereign. That is why Hobbes’ final stroke involves the negation of the eternal life of punishment of those condemned to hell:

“And amongst these bodily pains is to be reckoned also to every one of the wicked a second death. For though the Scripture be clear for a universal resurrection, yet we do no read that to any of the reprobate is promised an eternal life. For whereas St. Paul (…), to the question concerning what bodies men shall rise with again, saith that “The body is sown in corruption, and is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power,” glory and power cannot be applied to the bodies of the wicked, nor can the name of second death be applied to those that can never die but once. And although in metaphorical speech a calamitous life everlasting may be called an everlasting death, yet it cannot well be understood of a second death”. ^[97]

What this scheme of hell shows us is that hell is no worse than the worst imaginable life possible in the commonwealth. Hell is on earth, tormentors are enemies of the Christian commonwealth, torment is grief and discontent and envy for other’s happiness due to disobedience to the law and, above all, hell turns out to be a violent second death. Fear of hell equals fear of violent death and misery in life. Not only is hell no worse than the sovereign’s worst punishment, but also the latter is the greatest possible harm to one’s life and body. With this move, Hobbes has granted the sovereign the power to threaten “hell on earth,” or something with exactly the same characteristics and effects. If a citizen becomes a Satan, that is, an enemy of the state, he will automatically be condemned to an earthly, temporal, terrene, civil, secular hell. There is a hint in Leo Strauss, as well, that this moment in the Leviathan is essential:

“For what is the antithesis between vanity and fear of violent death, if not the “secularized” form of the traditional antithesis between spiritual pride and fear of God (or humility), a secularized form which results from the Almighty God having been replaced by the over-mighty enemies and then by the over-mighty State, “the Mortal God”? (…) On the contrary, this antithesis is an essential indispensable element, or, more accurately, the essential basis, of Hobbes’s political philosophy”.^[98]

Moreover, the State of Nature is also a state of grief and discontent that leads to calamities, misery and violent death. It is a state without the light of authority; the state of envying other people’s happiness; and a state in which no industry, art, culture or life can outcrop. Consequently, the perils of disobedience, the perils of creating division within the commonwealth, the existence of such a thing as “ghostly power” competing with the sovereign’s power, the rising of factions and political divisions, in a word, all that leads to the destruction of the commonwealth and to the state of war causes hell to appear on earth for all subjects. This is what I call “secularization of hell” because it transfers the power that hell granted to the Church, through its atemporal, immaterial nature, to the secular, civil, and political purposes of the sovereign’s office, that is, the state and its historical circumstances and needs. By eliminating its spiritual, its eternal, and its supernatural nature, hell becomes available for terrene, temporal and natural purposes.

Logically, salvation becomes, through this secular scheme, a synonym for the peaceful commonwealth, that is, the absence of war: “To be saved from sin is to be saved from all evil and calamities that sin hath brought upon us. And therefore, in the Holy Scripture remission of sin, and salvation from death and misery, is the same thing”.^[99] Thus, in the first place, salvation is –according to Scripture– a life uncorrupted by sin, and protected against the trespasses of others. But also –according to reason– salvation is a way of avoiding the consequences of sin in one’s own life, namely, misery and death: “And it is besides evident in reason that, since death and misery were the punishments of sin, the discharge of sin must also be a discharge of death and misery, that is to say, salvation absolute.”^[100] In sum, to be saved is “to be secured, either respectively, against special evils, or absolutely, against all evil (comprehending want, sickness, and death itself).”^[101]

The rewards that salvation brings are exactly the same as the obligations of the sovereign in Hobbes’ state theory. Peace and security are the main goals of his theory, and submission to a single power is necessary to avoid war and discontent. If this parallelism was not sufficiently clear, Hobbes himself makes explicit situations that fall exactly under sovereign responsibility:

“Concerning particular salvations such as are understood (1 sam. 14:39) “as the Lord liveth that saveth Israel,” that is, from their temporary enemies, and (2 Kings 13:5) “God gave the Israelites a Saviour, and so they were delivered from the hand of the Assyrians,” and the like, I need say nothing, there being neither difficulty, nor interest, to corrupt the interpretation of texts of that kind”.^[102]

All the attributes of God have been rendered secular and have been granted to this sole power on earth, a head of state that is the King of the Proud, a Leviathan, or, more accurately, now a “mortal God”, a secularized God. Apparently, the problem of fear of the absolute future, the problem of the existence of a reward or punishment greater than those which the sovereign can bestow has been solved. However, there can still be a greater punishment than death, that is, in second death, beyond pain, one ends up being denied access to the eternal Kingdom of God, whose existence Hobbes, by the way, does not deny. The faithful receive “eternal life” in the everlasting peaceful commonwealth. So, the dilemma between obeying one’s own personal conviction of God’s commandments and the commands of the sovereign -when they are not the same- remains a problem for the unified, secularized form of “divine politics.” Hobbes completes the circle, however, by inferring from Scripture the only two requirements for salvation, once all the Church requirements have been abolished. First, the profession of faith: Jesus is the Lord, the Son of God, the Sovereign of the Kingdom of God to come, while God-father is the Sovereign over all of nature. Second, obedience to the law of the civil sovereign, who is the true interpreter of God’s commands and God’s law. This is crucial, as Leo Strauss states:

“Hobbes declares that unconditional obedience to the secular power is the bounden duty of every Christian, in so far as that power does not forbid belief in Jesus as Christ. But the crucial question: Is the Christian obliged to obey the secular power when that power forbids him the profession of his faith? is answered in the earlier presentation with the finding that the right and duty of the Christian in such a case is only passive resistance and martyrdom, while the Leviathan denies the obligation and even the right of martyrdom to the ordinary Christian who has not the special vocation of preaching the Gospel. According to De Cive it is a Christian dogma that Christ’s kingdom is not of earth but of heaven; in the Leviathan, on the other hand, the Kingdom of God under the Old and also under the New Covenant is to be understood as a purely earthly kingdom. According to the Elements, the first duty of the sovereign is to establish the religion they hold for best”; in De Cive the corresponding paragraph concludes with the words: “Difficultatem autem hanc in medio relinquemus”; in the Leviathan the whole matter is no longer even mentioned.”^[103]

If a sin is commanded, the sovereign is the sinner, not the subject that obeys. But, in disobeying the law out of one’s own moral conscience gives personal opinion a role in the commonwealth. This is the main problem of the age:

“The sovereign’s absolute responsibility required and presupposed his absolute domination of all subjects. Only if all subjects were equally under the ruler’s thumb could he assume sole responsibility for peace and order. Thus, a deep breach was laid in the subject’s position. Previously they had their places in a manifold, if loose, structure of responsibilities: as members of a Church, as dependent vassals, in the framework of their own political institutions or of the feudal order of estates. But the more of the sense of this pluralistic world was reversed into senselessness of civil warfare, the more the subjects faced a similarly cogent alternative as that facing the King himself: “Know then that almost all men have been reduced to this point: to be on bad terms either with their conscience or with the course of the century”. ^[104]

To follow one’s conscience -what Hobbes calls “opinion”, as we have seen, can lead to division and war, that is, hell. As Koselleck points out: “The need to found a state transforms the moral alternative of good and evil into the political alternative of peace and war”.^[105] That is, also, from a metaphysical dilemma to a historical and political one. Keeping in mind Taylor’s third definition of secularization, one final aspect of Hobbes’ theory is unveiled. What Taylor calls the “new conditions of belief” that subtitute plain enchanted faith, is, in Hobbes’s theory, split in two: on the one hand, condtitions to believe in Christ and to follow the public religion are, in fact, simple obedience to the absolute sovereign. On the other hand, a sphere remains where one can believe whatever he or she wants, that is, the private sphere of belief. One can follow his private religion, insofar as one professes the public faith in the public sphere. That is the new condition of belief. Outside the private domain, all religion becomes, in fact, secular, that is, in this case, political.

***

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24 · 04 · 2010

Eternity vs the Will

Karl Löwith’s reading of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence of the Same

Introduction

Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same is a strange book. And it is strange in the strictest sense. It has been a stranger in the corpus of books that are commonly used as interpretative tools to unveil Nietzsche’s work. There are several reasons for this strangeness, some of them are (were) political, some of them are (were) philosophical and some of them are just the fruit of chance; but among them there are neither the lack of quality nor the lack of profundity.

It can be argued that the role of Nietzsche in the history of Philosophy as well as his role in the history of Politics lay in the core of this book; although it is perfectly clear also that the essence of Löwith‘s reading of Nietzsche stands on its own strengths; and its value –when it was first published and today– is absolutely independent of its circumstances.

However, in order to fully understand what this book says and why it says what it says, in order to see why and how it has been in such a shadow of silence until a few years ago, it is necessary to begin this paper with a brief political and historical excursion. I am aware of the strangeness of an introduction to a paper Nietzsche that accounts for the history of a book that wants to interpret what is to be discussed hereafter. However, Nietzsche’s philosophy was so explicitly influential in the political life of Germany during the 1920s and 1930s that any book on his philosophy published amidst that convulsion must be understood as part of the conversation (or of the absence of debate) of the time.

Moreover, the controversy over the meaning of Nietzsche’s most famous claims, and the manipulation of them for political goals, become a crowded hall of mirrors that not only explains something about how a specific author –namely, Nietzsche– was understood; but, above all, they explain also both the roots and the consequences of his philosophy. This why I will begin this paper first by showing the political circumstances and, second, the philosophical circumstances of Löwith’s attempt, including differences and disagreements between Heidegger’s, the Nazi’s and Löwith’s interpretation of Nietzsche. Then, I will explain the main thesis of the book on the eternal recurrence of the same and the will to power. Along Lowith’s interpretation, I will explain my own view on his thesis.

I

The history of the book and its political circumstances

Karl Löwith was a German philosopher of Jewish descent born at the dusk of XIX century. In his book, published in 1939, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933, Löwith narrates the birth and childhood of cultural national-socialism in Germany from 1914 until its maturity with the rise of Hitler in 1932 through his own personal experience. Besides the widely known political evolution of the time, what is central to Löwith’s narration is the at first discrete and later raging persecution of Jewish scholars in German universities during the first years of Hitler’s rule. As Gadamer too has explained in his philosophical memoirs, the persecution was grounded in a cultural milieu that became more and more anti-Semitic, and ended up excluding Jewish scholars from all key positions in German universities. In the beginning, the process of exclusion was euphemistically pursued, while at the end, as everybody knows, even the word “persecution” sounds as an euphemism, considering the fate of all German Jews.

However, as Löwith’s autobiography shows, the growing presence of Nazism in universities was palpable in several details that not only aimed at banning Jewish scholars from their positions, but also pushed to establish a definitive interpretation of German culture, history and philosophy that found its hegemony thanks to direct or indirect (subtle or not so subtle) forms of censorship.

Löwith was one of the first intellectuals to see the danger and the ultimate goals of Hitler’s policies. He also understood their philosophical foundation, earlier than anybody else. While other Jewish scholars maintained their hope for a possible academic life in Germany, Löwith saw that the real problem was not for the scholars to be marginalized, but for the entire Jewish population’s survival and for the catastrophic path that his country was taken.

In 1934 Löwith was granted a scholarship by the Rockefeller Foundation and moved to Italy. Before leaving, his last courses in the University of Marburg were, precisely, on Nietzsche. Löwith saw in the hegemonic interpretation of Nietzsche one of the roots of Nazism –this was not a very difficult inference to make, given the published love of Nazi intellectuals for him. So, he used his last courses in defiance of the dominant interpretation of Nietzsche:

“I wanted to make clear to the students that Nietzsche prepares the way for, and at the same time represents the severest rejection of the present situation in Germany. Nietzsche is a “National Socialist” and a “cultural Bolshevik” –depending on how one maneuvers him. In opposition to this usage that is suited or perhaps unsuited to the times, I tried to establish the idea of eternity as the center of his philosophy”.

Once he left to Italy, he began writing Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence of the Same. By 1935 the book was finished and sent to different publishers, and Gerhard Bahlsen, the owner of the press “Die Runde” published it in Berlin. This was surely not an easy decision considering the situation: “The journal Kantstudien declined in 1935 to publish Löwith’s article on the relationship of Marx’s to Kierkegaard’s stance on Hegel –despite the editor’s having formally accepted the piece a year earlier –for ‘technical reasons”. As Löwith dryly observes in his memoir, the ‘technical reasons were that Marx was taboo in Germany and the author was not an Aryan.’ Also in 1936 Löwith could not find any German press for his book on Burckhardt, which was finally published in Switzerland.

Nevertheless, the book on Nietzsche was published without the Appendix, which is a set of twelve short reviews of divers interpretations of Nietzsche that include a strong criticism of Alfred Baecumler’s depiction of Nietzsche as the thinker of the “will as power” and also the at the time unpublished interpretation of Nietzsche by Löwith’s teacher, Martin Heidegger. Baecumler was the official interpreter of Nietzsche appointed by the regime, while Heidegger was –beyond his membership to the party– always considered essentially a Nazi by Löwith. Both reviews contained in the Appendix are explicit in their criticism of the nazification of Nietzsche. Löwith himself distributed the Appendix privately, and it was not until the second edition of the book in Stuttgart in 1956 that the reviews were made public –when its keenness was not even half useful– just some years after he taught at the New School for Social Research.

Therefore, it can be said that Löwith tried to recover Nietzsche from Nazi’s hands as much as he could. And, as we have seen in the quote about his last courses in Marburg, he did so by means of a philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche’s œuvre that privileges the eternal recurrence of the same as the core of Nietzsche’s thought, placing it above the will to power. This is not to say, however, that Löwith interpretation is expressly political, nor that he distorted Nietzsche’s philosophy in order to invalidate national-socialism either. On the contrary, Löwith main critique of other interpreters -both Nazi and non-Nazi– is that they use ideology or other external intellectual frames to interpret Nietzsche, reading into his published works and private letters their own biases. Ultimately they do not stay close to Nietzsche’s text. Löwith’s argumentation, on the contrary, is full of several long quotations from Nietzsche’s books, and is structured as an internal critique that looks for consistency –or inconsistency–in Nietzsche’s texts rather than for its accordance with ‘‘reality’’ or with the interpreter’s (unacknowledged) thought. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same is the work of a hermeneutician, neither the opinion of an adversary nor that of a cheerleader.

It is not strange, then, that Löwith’s book did not become a bestseller in 1930’s Germany. What is important, however, is that although his Jewish descent was an unsurmountable obstacle for the success of his book, Löwith’s interpretation of Nietzsche would have been politically incorrect anyway, even if he had been a non-Jewish party enthusiast. When the Nazi Party’s censorship of the Nietzsche edition that Heidegger was helping to prepare intensified in 1938, even Heidegger stopped working with the Commission that was chaired with the edition: In the famous Der Spiegel interview of 1966, (published after his death) Heidegger said: “Everyone who had ears to hear was able to hear in these lectures [the series of lectures on Nietzsche given from 1936 to 1940] a confrontation with National Socialism”.

By the time World War II was over, Löwith returned to Germany (persuaded by Gadamer) and published the second edition of the book. Löwith became a well respected figure, both for his memoir, and his philosophical work, especially his work in the area of Philosophy of History and his most celebrated book: From Hegel to Nietzsche, which includes some of the thesis of the book we are commenting, but under the light of a broader discussion on XIX century German philosophy, and its connections and evolutions. However, in the 1960s Anglo-speaking world, Heidegger’s Nietzsche volumes were dominant, and apparently, according to Berd Magnus, Löwith’s criticism of Heidegger and, especially, of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, cast a cloak of silence and indifference over the book. Although Löwith’s interpretation of Nietzsche has gained increasing recognition in recent years, and has become one of the original poles of interpretation to fully understand Nietzsche, it is worth noting that the English translation was not published until 1997, the French translation not until 1994, the Italian translation not until 1996 and–although all other books by Löwith are already translated into Spanish–the one in question remains yet to be translated.

II

The Philosophical meaning of the context: Stefan George as a link between Nietzsche and Löwith.

In the 19th century–at the time Nietzsche is publishing– a set of difficult philosophical questions is raised at the culmination of early modern thought. This paper is not the place to develop these questions. A simple analysis of the discussion about exactly what questions were raised as a consequence of the philosophical debate of the 18th and 19th century would demand, at the very least, an entire paper. Assuming that any brief characterization of them would always be insufficient, we will, for the purposes of this paper, however, reduce these questions to a single problematic: Is there anything else beyond matter? The question of materialism, however, is expressed in many ways. Three useful answers to this problem in XIX century that will help us to understand the tension between Nietzsche and his interpreters, including Löwith, (especialy in what concerns the reception and meaning of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same), are materialism as economism, materialism as scientism and materialism as atheism. In fact the three of them are interrelated and constantly overlap. In this paper we will consider the relationship between materialism in general and nihilism. In order to not overlook the positive aspects of materialism, however, it is important to note that each form of materialism can be equally related to different spheres of life (Sloterdijk) as it can to a form of nihilism.

As for economism, XIX saw how liberal-capitalism developed its powers profusely. The awakening of technology, the yet to be developed public policies and the comparatively low taxes of the day, favored a situation in which a version of Smithian “free market” could carry the day, in which consumerism –although extremely limited– appeared and in which the bourgeois mentality burgeoned. At the same time, however, industrialism and proletarianism found its ideological consequences in dialectal materialism: Marxism and other forms of socialism. These two political and theoretical forces found their pulse in a conception of life and history that remained within the confines of “matter”, understood as goods, money or means to live.

As for scientism, it is also clear that XIX Century Europe witnessed the most astonishing development in science in all of history up until that point. As a result of the Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern empiricism, XIX century Europe was the century of the first reliable massive and popular results of the search for natural causes and the laws of nature that had been undertaken for, at least, two centuries, namely, technology. Some examples: 1832, Sauvage invents the helix; 1833, Faraday completes his experiments on electrolysis; 1835, Colt commercializes the first revolver; 1841; 1839, Daguerre: photography; 1846, Morton: anesthesia by ether; 1840, Liebig: chemical fertilizer; 1854: Barsanti-Matteucci: explosion motor; 1860, Lippis: torpedo, etc. Not to mention Plank, Ohm, Darwin, Joule or Mendel and their contributions to theoretical science. In a sense, Science became normal, that is, its significance entered into everyday practice. Scientific explanations of the world appeared as sufficient in praxis, giving it credence despite its contestable epistemological foundations. Philosophically, the outcrop of XIX century science and technology reinforced the fundamental question of natural determinism that had been addressed by most of the moderns, above all by Kant.

As for atheism, the process of secularization and the end of ecclesiastical authority started as early as the XIII century by humanists and reformists and, later on by Descartes, Hobbes and a long list of thinkers. It also found its normality in the XIX century Europe. Deprived of its essence, Christianity became just a beautiful liturgical form of hypocrisy and masquerade.

Philosophers of all kinds, and especially, German Idealists, devoted themselves to answer with different formulations, approaches and scopes the same question: is there anything else beyond matter? This question went behind the ivory tower concern of academia, but addressed the fundamental spirit of the times as what was once an exclusively a philosophical problem, namely, deterministic materialism, became a common belief for everyday survival.

Nietzsche’s thought is precisely an answer to this question. In his anti-Christian diatribes there is something more than a mere duel with God, there is above all a vociferating of the state of things: God is dead, and all metaphysical philosophies grounded on the Western (Judeo-Christian) tradition already condemned to failure. The fundamental lie of the West no longer has any purchase: As Nietzsche says of “truth,” “coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”

Western Judeo-Christian values and its voids, the tale about its origin and the promise of its goals, its ethical horizon and its conception of the world are no longer relevant. Its vision of the cosmos and its conception of Being have become, just like Christ’s tunic, after the crucifixion, the object of a wager, like the Roman soldiers who played a dice game on the shadow of God’s corpse. Nietzsche is the first to learn the true surname of the epoch and that of its offspring: nihilism. Nietzsche sees how at the peak of modernity the modern man does not know anymore where to go, or what is more, where “he” is going.

But as Nietzsche valiantly affirms, there is a certain kind of freedom in nihilism. The freedom of nothingness is, like Buridan’s ass, absolute immobility and a starving death. The modern man has been liberated from the fundamental lie of two thousand years of history, but has yet to find the new horizon, or the courage to live without horizons. Nietzsche’s vitalism, his return to the being to nature, his early positivism and biologism, his first formulations of his idea of the will, his call for self-overcoming, his return to pre-Socratic paganism and his embrace of Dionysus and ostracizing of Apollo, all of them conform a fundamental negation of the terms in which the question was asked, “is there anything else beyond matter?” Nietzsche accomplished an extremely powerful move to be able to change the question. Even his self-laudatory literature expresses the force of his desire: Nietzsche unbends the iron of his age to make the skeleton of his time fit for the future. The very premises of this question, for Nietzsche, are false: The question itself is posed within the very metaphysical horizon that is no longer viable. The new question is: “How can life self-determine its own determinism?” The path of the self-overcoming is ultimately a path of “coming” (back) to one’s own nature. This return to nature must, however, remain distinct from the lifeless naturalism of the material sciences.  (We will come back to these issues later in this paper).

However, despite Nietzsche’s impact, he was not received as one of les philosophes; consequently, nor was his “philosophy” acknowledged as a systematic body of thought until much later –it is precisely Löwith who represents one of his first defenders in this respect, as he argues that his writings do indeed constitute a philosophy: the word “philosophy” in the title of the book in question is a vindication of Nietzsche’s philosophical character. Nietzsche was, nevertheless, considered a writer, a poet, a psychologist, a sociologist, a fool and a provocateur.

One of his first and most fervent admirers was the German poet Stefan George. His poetic interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy served as one of the most important links between what Nietzsche said and his impact in the German culture and politics. Löwith criticizes his interpretation (“pure Nazism”) in several works, including this one, but especially in his memoir above mentioned. In order to understand the role that Löwith’s interpretation played among Nietzsche’s reception during the 20th century, and his struggle against both biased and unconscious philosophical misinterpretations of the latter’s work, I argue that the figure of Stephan George is especially illustrating.

Stefan George (1868-1933) was the first to call Nietzsche “a prophet”. He saw in Nietzsche’s Übermensch the prophecy of an imminent overcoming of the category “man”, and in his own life he tried to embody that transformation. His poetry, strongly influenced by French symbolists, above all Mallarmé, is a call to Orphism, is a call to the (re)discovery of “spirit” in nature. He rejected both the “soft classicism” and the radical “naturalism” of the German literature of the time. George, following Nietzsche, wanted to retrieve pre-Socratic Paganism; and  used to perform Dionysian rituals within his circle of disciples. The praise of strength, homo-erotic love and Heraclitean essential Polemos encompass his verses through the distinction between the nobility of certain men and the vulgar mass of the ignorant and the weak. He rejected all forms of political materialism and economicism, including both communism and bourgeois liberalism,  his circle of disciples despised the intellect without blood and distinguished the “experience born from education” from “the originary experience” (i.e. force and aristocracy). George demanded a spiritual-pagan-orphic reawakening, a “new Reich”, and a new “Führer” that would stir he dormant German soul that had been suppressed for so long by Christianity:

I journeyed home: such flood of blossoms never

Had welcomed me … a throbbing in the field

And in the grove there was of sleeping powers.

I saw the river, slope and shire enthralled,

And you, my brothers, sun-heirs of the future:

Your eyes, still chase, are harboring a dream,

Once yearning thoughts in you, to blood shall alter…

My sorrow-stricken life to slumber leans,

But graciously does heaven’s promise guerdon

The fervent … who may never pace the Reich.

I shall be earth, shall be the grave of heroes,

That sacred sons approach to be fulfilled.

With them the second age comes, love engendered

The world, again shall love engender it.

I spoke the spell, the circle has been woven …

Before the darkness fall, I shall be snatched

Aloft and know: through cherished fields shall wander

On weightless soles, aglow and real, the God

Contrasting George’s spiritual mysticism with the mechanistic worldview of the Modern era, Heidegger writes:

“This type of [technological] thinking is about to abandon the earth as earth. As calculation, it drifts more and more rapidly and obsessively toward the conquest of cosmic space. This type of thinking is itself already the explosion of a power that could blast everything to nothingness. All the rest that follows from such thinking, the technical processes in the functioning of the doomsday machinery, would merely be the final sinister dispatch of madness into senselessness. As early as 1917, Stefan George, in his great ode “The war” written during the First World War, said: “These are the fiery signs –not the tidings” (Das Neue Reich, p.29).”

The circle around Stefan George was formed by a group of German intellectuals completely devoted to this new poet-leader.  Among his followers were writers, painters, philosophers, linguists and politicians (Rudolf Fahrner, Karl Schefold, Karl Wohlfskehl, Friedrich Gundolf, Edgar Salin, Berthold Vallentin, Erich Kahler, Ernst Kantorowicz, Kurt Singer). His influence was tremendous: Both Gadamer and Heidegger acknowledged it. In his memoir, Löwith asserts that the circle around Stefan George played an important role to prepare the way for the Nazi ideology. Even Goebbels studied with one of the members of George’s circle. The linguistic basis for what would become the core of Nazi rhetoric and propaganda was almost entirely taken from George’s poetry.

Like Nietzsche, or following Nietzsche, George combined a cosmological vision with an anthropological one. The ring of the eternal recurrence of the same was expressed in George as poetic truth. His ritualistic performances and his pretended access to truth through beauty were parts of this sort of natural neo-pagan religion devoted to Dionysus. On the other hand, his denouncing of nihilism, and wars based on old dead disputes (namely, the First World War) instead of the war for spiritualization and self-overcoming, his seek for the new man, his circle of the noble and its esoteric knowledge, his “intellect with blood”, his demand for a “Führer” and a “Reich” that would destroy the senselessness of both communist and liberal-democratic states was his poetic and political expression of the “will to power”. Stefan George wanted to be Zarathustra.

According to Löwith, the ideology of George’s circle was a “pure Nazism”, and indeed when Adolf Hitler arrived to power, some of his followers thought that Hitler was the Führer they had all been waiting for. However, when the new regime offered George the chair of the German Academy of Poetry, hoping to gain his support, he refused and went into voluntary exile in Switzerland, where he died only a few months later, in 1933. The Führer was not the Führer-Superman he had been longing for. The project of the third Reich was not what he had in mind with his “new Reich”.

Notwithstanding George’s rejection of the Nazi party, Nazism too must be understood  (also) as a response to the metaphysical crisis of XIX century. Its goal was to create a spiritual political system based on the idea of “will as power” and a conviction that a self-overcoming of man was able to master whatever came its way. Totalitarianism, dictatorship, racial supremacy and conquest occupied the space left vacant by religion. Nazism -slotted to prevail for a thousand years- was to overcome nihilism; it would lead the spiritual awakening of the German soul, the birth of the new superman and the binding force that would give meaning and purpose to the lost modern man. Liberalism and communism were the responsible for German decadence. Their modernity and their materialism were leading men to the pyre of despair and senselessness. Christianity and Judaism represented the enthronement of the lowest values, and the Jews especially were considered a plague. The will to power and self-overcoming were finally transmuted into decisionism. A pure unrooted immanent will became the absolute transcendence of the German soul. Will is power.

Why did George reject this pseudo-Nietzschean regime? Was it because of the Nazi’s way of embracing technology and science instead of the Nietzschean way of loving the Being of the World and nature? Apparently so. However, even if we consider that Löwith sees in George a form of “pure Nazism”, it is conceivable that, if George took Nietzsche seriously as “a prophet” and “believed” everything he said, he had necessarily to embrace as an essential part of Nietzsche’s “prophecy” the eternal recurrence of the same, which his poems themselves, in fact, suggest, instead of the “thousand-year Reich”, the temporal enslaving ideal of Nazism. Indeed, the official Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche  the importance of the eternal recurrence, focusing exclusively on the will to power instead. Löwith is rather dry in the Appendix of Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same when he analyzes Alfred Baeumler’s (“at the time of the Third Reich was the official advocate and editor of Nietzsche’s works”) interpretation of Nietzsche: “As a consequence of this arbitrary expurgation of the teaching of the return from the context of the will to power, Baeumler is forced to assimilate the ‘innocence of becoming’, which originally results from the eternal recurrence, into a will to power without an eternal recurrence and to see in the will to power only the “will as power”.

And moreover:

“Apparently Beaumler wanted to swing the sword with fresh and gay science, and because Nietzsche’s teaching of the eternal recurrence of the same [...] did not suit that purpose, Baeumler had to devise a fitting interpretation of Nietzsche. The formula that Beaumler coins for Nietzsche’s worldview and that came into use in many variation is that of’ heroic realism.’”

Baeumler’s concept of the will does not “as in the case of Nietzsche, attempt ‘to turn’ irresponsibility into something ‘positive’ but only wants not ‘to accept responsibility’ any longer and is self-confident because it does not know what and why it wills at all. This will is at bottom nothing other than an explosion of force’”.

Even Heidegger found this interpretation remote to his thinking, and he attempted to reconcile the will to power and the eternal recurrence of the same. Yet, his interpretation tried to render them compatible to his theory of the forgetfulness of Being in Western metaphysics beginning with Plato and culminating in Nietzsche, that is, reading the will to power and the recurrence of the same as the traditional metaphysical distinction between existence and essence. Löwith criticizes Heidegger by claiming that he misunderstands Nietzsche when he makes “the will to power” prevail over the Eternal Recurrence, and when he turns the tension of eternity at the moment of “noon”, (the “new birth”) into a mere theory of values, a will that suffices itself, and a “Being” that is never a “Becoming” when the perfection of “authenticity” is repeated over an over.

“Despite Nietzsche’s express statement that the total Character of life and of the living world cannot be assessed and evaluated, Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy as a ‘metaphysics of values’ and interprets value as a ‘point of view’, the simple meaning of which he artfully misinterprets. But the conception of the world that Nietzsche envisions [...] is characterized by the idea that life as will to power cannot be devaluated because “in every moment” life is wholly what it is, and remains equally powerful and signifies the same through an alteration”.

What Heidegger does not see is that the critical repetition is the repetition of the “moment”, that is, the repetition of the becoming as necessity. (Löwith in fact seems to suggest that Heidegger willfully misinterprets Nietzsche here). The courage to love this fate implies loving the fatalistic ego under an understanding of the Being of the World as “perfected” in its fate.

“As an eternal recurrence of the same, Nietzsche’s eternity appears in Heidegger’s interpretation only in that he will to power –the vantage point from which he one-sidedly interprets the teaching of the return– secures the lasting continuance of itself for a willing that is ‘as homogeneous and regular as possible’”.

Here we see the decisive space that Löwith’s book occupies, and we finally can move on to his main thesis, which is both an extremely rigorous attempt to unveil Nietzsche’s system and in itself a courageous and lucid political response to Nazism at the dawn of 20th century tragedy.

III

Löwith’s main thesis

Löwith’s main thesis on Nietzsche’s work has two aspects: one formal and the other material. Both are already implied in the title of his book: Nietzsche’s work is a “philosophy”, i.e. a system of thought, and its content is the “eternal recurrence of the same”.

As we have seen both claims were not as wide-spread in 1935 as they are today. As for the formal side of Löwith’s claim, the two principal problems that any interpreter faces when she tries to systematize Nietzsche’s thinking are those of genre and unity. The problem of genre raises the question of who exactly Nietzsche is as an author: is he a poet? a novelist? a mystic? Or even if we consider his writings a system of thought: is he a psychologist? A sociologist? In 1935 the question was just beginning to be answered. The main obstacle was that Nietzsche’s writings did not fit neatly into any established, or, at the very least, his style was atypical among philosophers. The treatise in the modern era was almost the exclusive vehicle to communicate philosophical ideas in writing. Outstanding exceptions like Montaigne or Pascal, both of whom belonged to that ambiguous category of sui generis philosophers, are, in a sense, Nietzsche’s precursors. . The fact that Nietzsche’s writings are different suggest that his choice of style was deliberate. Just as Plato’s choice of genre (Dialoguea) in communicating his ideas (in a time when this genre was not common in philosophy) was not arbitrary but fully connected with the content of his philosophy. Nietzsche’s genre must be considered with respect to the message that he is trying to send. Hence, the difficult task of placing his writings in a concrete, well-established genre, (that is, a formal category that would allow the reader to know in advance what kind of discourse she is reading) forces the interpreter to look into the content in order to understand what the form means and how form and content are connected. The parallelism with Plato in this respect is suitable because both of them were committed to creating a new form of philosophizing, or, more accurately, a new form of thinking: the right one, so to speak. In their style there is a foundational moment. But, concerning Nietzsche’s form, which draws on evangelical narrative (In Zarathustra), aphorisms (his philosophizing “with a hammer”) and poems, the second question appears to be the most difficult to solve. The question of unity is essential in determing whether his writings form an amorphous set of unconnected sparks of wisdom, beauty and madness or a system of thought that aims at the “truth” or that attains some kind of “knowledge”.

Löwith’s first claim is that Nietzsche’s work is a philosophy and that his aphoristic form is intimately linked to the content of his enterprise and, secondly that the eternal recurrence of the same is what gives unity to the content, and the form, of his entire project:

“Nietzsche’s philosophy is neither a unified, closed system nor a variety of disintegrating aphorisms, but rather a system in aphorisms. What is peculiar about the philosophic form of theses aphorisms characterizes their content as well. The systematic character of Nietzsche’s philosophy results from the specific way in which Nietzsche sets about, persists in, and carries out his philosophical experiment; the aphoristic character results from the experimenting as such. The single meaning of Nietzsche’s multiple metamorphoses must be understood in terms of the fundamentally experimental character of his philosophizing”

What kind of experiment is he carrying out? And which is the object of his experimentation? Nietzsche departs from the idea of experimentation in the modern age, especially in its origins, that is, Leonardo’s and the Renaissance inquirers’. It is a form of experimentation based on a pure form of curiosity, but, according to Löwith, a form of inquiring that is already advancing nihilism. His early radical skepticism and acute criticism of values and culture demand that he set out on an experimental path of pursuing truth. Nietzsche-Zarathustra is a wanderer towards truth, but he has no basis, no roots, no original moment to come back to, and no basis for looking for a purpose when he is lost. In this sense, life is the experiment. Not just a passive reception of experiences: the philosopher-wanderer turns his life into an experiment that begins with a progressive letting-off, an increasing discharge of the burden of assumptions and lies of the tradition. The first step thus is that of an emptying-out of oneself. Löwith sees in Nietzsche’s “experimentation” both anti-dogmatism and the reason for his rejection of “phony” systematizations that are slated to discover knowledge. From this perspective, Nietzsche’s philosophy and life are one. His experiments are his aphorisms; and his aphorisms are his life. Not only nihilism, but also the overcoming of it and the self-overcoming through the will that accepts and learns to love the fate of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same are, according to Löwith, already contained in this experimenting-aphoristic-parabolic “method”.

“…because according to this teaching [eternal recurrence] the ‘lot of humanity’ has already ‘been there eternally’ and has long been decided, there is in human knowing, too, no capriciousness but only fate. Already in Nietzsche’s attempt to refrain from a system, there rules first and finally a necessity that compels him to develop as a system the idea of eternally recurring Being. And in the aphorism, which is seemingly the fleeting form of merely accidental ideas, Nietzsche wanted –in agreement with his philosophy– to mold not a transitory apothegm but a ‘form of eternity’”.

Therefore, it is already seen that this experiment, this wandering towards nothingness to end up with “truth”, is both a form of self-fashioning (an experiment with one’s own life), and also a path to let one’s own nature, (one’s own necessity,) emerge: the being of the wanderer is becoming what one is. It is already, then, a form of amor fati: the central tension of Nietzsche’s philosophy of which the Eternal Recurrence of the same is “the last experiment” that makes the whole project turn into a teaching.

Consequently, Löwith organizes Nietzsche’s work into three periods that correspond to two transformations. These transformations are experimental correlates of the phases of the self-overcoming taught by Zarathustra: that is, the movement from the “Thou shalt” to the “I will”, and from the “I will” to the “I am”: “Two critical metamorphoses justify the differentiation of Nietzsche’s writings into three periods: first, the transformation from the reverential disciple into the self-liberating spirit, and second, from the spirit that has been liberated into the teaching master”.

Further, these biographical metamorphoses lead to three periods of publication:

“The first period comprises, of the writings published by Nietzsche himself, The Birth of Tragedy, and the Untimely Meditations. The second includes the writings of the ‘plowshare’: Human, All-too-Human; The Dawn of Day; and the first four books of The Gay Science. The third period begins on the foundation of the idea of the eternal recurrence, with Zarathustra, and ends with Ecce Hommo. This period alone contains Nietzsche’s genuine philosophy”.

The first self-transformation is a metamorphosis from the “Thou shalt” to the “I will”. It is the tale of the liberation of reason turned into the way towards nihilism. This period in Nietzsche’s work is considered his “positivistic” period. However, Löwith claims that this is only so if we understand it from the standpoint of the later writings, that is, from the doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. From this point of view, positivism is just a “disappointed romanticism” on the way to a “resolute nihilism”. It is the interim state that demands a total rejection of all ties: cultural, geographical, and metaphysical. It is the journey of the wanderer that goes from the old ties to the Thou shalt have free will, which is a relative freedom, a freedom that is, above all, eccentricity: a separation from the world of men. Later, however, this goalless path of the wanderer ends up in a moment of absolute nihilism in which only the will remains: all the rest has been erased. It is the moment of the “I will”. There is no more skepticism in the “I will”. Skepticism was the energy of the wanderer, a relative freedom that is only a form of doubt that asks for reasons at every stage. “Thou shalt doubt” is the motto of this interim wanderer. But, once the abyss of nothingness has been encountered, the wanderer does not doubt any longer, he is denying everything, except for his will. Once the absolute “no” has been formulated, then a space for the “yes” opens up, just as shadow and light are dependent  on one another.

Nevertheless, Löwith sees the transitoriness of relative nihilism as a preparation for the eventual affirmation of the Eternal Recurrence. However the extreme point of nihilism at stage of the “I will” remains the no-yet-actualized possibility of loving such eternity:

“The very skepticism of the free spirit of the wanderer already has a hidden “will to wisdom”. And just as the “abyss” of extreme nihilism “speaks again” only when the opposite idea, that of the eternal recurrence, also wants to be spoken, so does the shadow, too, speak to the wanderer”.

This second metamorphosis is a self-transformation less dependent on the epoch or the weakening of the ties that once bound the wanderer. It is liberation from the “I will” to the “I am” of the Child of the world. The “I will” is not enough, “I will” only affirms one’s disposition, a negative freedom, amidst the nothingness. To be able to say “Yes” to the Being of the World is still necessary to affirm one’s own nature. It is necessary for Nietzsche-Zarathustra to remove the ultimate form of depreciating existence, namely, God, and to become one himself:

“This overcoming of being human ultimately occurs in the willing of the eternal recurrence. In the always recurring whole of Being that has always existed, the biggest objection against existence as such, against the accident of naked being-there, is removed. What the death of God liberates man’s existence for, is, however, at first not already the Yes to the eternal recurrence of the same, but nihilism, which in man is first a sickness and then a freedom unto death”.

This “I am” belongs to the “noontide”, an absolute quietness that ‘‘freezes’’ time and makes room for the acceptance of eternity and recurrence. It is at the same time the will to nothing and the overcoming of nothing. It is the path from the extreme “No” to the “Yes to Being”, that since it already says yes to fate, (the world as nature), it opens the door for the new-ancient cosmology.  The decisive circumstance of this second transformation is the acknowledgment of the meaning of the death of the Christian God:

“Because all “Thou shalt” of the moral imperative is finally measured against the Christian God who commanded man regarding what he should do, the death of God is at the same time the principle of the will that wills itself in man. In the ‘desert of his freedom,’ man prefers to will the nothing rather than not will, for he is “man” –without God–only insofar as he also “wills”. The death of God means the resurrection of the man who is abandoned to his own responsibility and command, the man who finally has his most extreme freedom in ‘freedom towards death’. At the peak of his freedom, however, the will to the nothing inverts itself into the willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The dead Christian God, the man before the nothing, and the will to the eternal recurrence characterize Nietzsche’s system as a whole as a moment first from “Thou shalt” to the birth of the “I will” and then to the rebirth of the “I am” as the “first movement” of an eternally recurring existence amidst the naturelike world of all that is”.

The path to the “noon” has been completed, the conditions for the acknowledgement and acceptance of the eternal recurrence have raised from a process of self-transformation that have led to a self-overcoming of human nature. “In the decisive, critical moment of the great noon –after the temporary noon of the philosophy of the morning –a cessation of time occurs. As the time of a unique decision, once and forever, the moment has –eternity.”

From the relative nihilism of the “Thou Shalt be free”, which was a form of eccentricity, to the negative freedom of the willing of nothingness in the moment of “I will”, until the last step, the affirmation of one’s nature as the Being of the World, an expression of the ineluctability of subjectivity that leads to the amor fati. At the peak of science’s own concept of necessity and repetition (i.e. the discovery of the laws of nature), scientific objectivity has failed to include a notion of the subject that (subjectively) wills necessity and repetition.  The “I am” is godlike, and reverses the will of nothing (the moment of the absence of origin and telos), to the acceptance of the new cosmology of the Eternal Recurrence as the nature of the Being of the World:

“As the ‘most pious of the godless’, Zarathustra becomes Zarathustra-Dionysus, in whose name Nietzsche accomplishes the last metamorphosis, from the heroic principle of “I will” into the godlike principle of “I am”. This latter principle is like the gods because through it what was previously heavy and difficult becomes light and easy.[...] …because the Yes-saying liberates from the burden of being there, which has fallen to man like an accident”.

The essential unity of all stages is its aiming to the moment of “noon”, the moment in which the prophecy of the Eternal Recurrence can be vociferated and actively accepted, that is, loved.

However, from that moment of noon arises also a fundamental contradiction between the superman or ‘the will to power’ and the eternal recurrence of the same (nothingness). The teaching of the superman is the precondition for the teaching of the eternal recurrence, because only the man who has overcome himself can also will the eternal recurrence of all that is”. Therefore, to prove the reconcilability or irreconcilability of the eternal recurrence of the same with the “will to power” or “the superman” is the main task of all interpreters, and all interpretation. According to Löwith, it is necessary to acknowledge both, however, Nietzsche’s fundamental idea is that it is the eternal recurrence that prevails over the will to power and not the other way around. (“The will to the superman and to the eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s ‘last will’ and his ‘last idea’ in which the whole of his experiment is systematically summarized”). Moreover, for Löwith, they are irreconcilable, because, after all, how can one will what will be anyway?:

“For on the one hand the idea of the eternal recurrence teaches a new purpose of human existence beyond human existence, a will to self-eternalization; but it also teaches the exact opposite: a revolving of the natural world in itself, a revolving that is just as selfless as it is goalless, and that includes human life. The cosmic meaning clashes with the anthropological meaning, so that the one contradicts the other”

Perhaps we can, with Löwith, reformulate this passage with the following questions: How can a more radical nihilism overcome nihilism? How can the ethical task of self- overcoming nihilism make any sense at all if the decision to transform one’s self and the moment of noon that opens eternity are contained in the necessity of the Being of the World, which itself follows a goalless necessity? The eternal recurrence of this same is its only content, so the wanting of it is the only real necessity. What is more striking is that a self-fashioning being and an extreme subjectivity are themselves indeed necessary. The superman is a necessary ‘becoming’ of the same that overcomes his thrownness (Heidegger) by withdrawing his own necessity from time. Nietzsche calls it fate and love: emptied or “atheized” forms of God and faith.

Löwith finds this tension essentially contradictory. Its irreconcilability is indeed irreducible. When Nietzsche says that the “most terrible” form of the idea of Eternal Recurrence is “existence just as it is, without any meaning or goal, but inexorably recurring, without a finale into the nothing: ‘the eternal recurrence.’ That is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the ‘meaningless’) as eternal!” Löwith sees that the kind of courage, or the kind of will necessary to walk this path through love, is far from an idea of the “will to power” based on domination or decisionism. The acknowledgement of this new cosmology as fact clashes with the idea of willing it:

“The willing human being is always mixed into the necessity of this game of the worlds. In the anthropological interpretation, the eternally same recurrence appeared as an ethical task, renewing itself in every moment, for the willing man for whom this teaching is to replace the Christian belief in immortality. In the cosmological interpretation, by contrast, the recurrence appeared not as a ‘plan for a new way to live’ and a ‘will to rebirth’ but as destruction and rebirth that happens by nature and that is completely indifferent to all plans made by man out of his thrownness”.

However, the Nietzschean cosmological formulations of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same suggest that a finite number of states of the world are destined to unfold in time, because time is infinite. Every state, every possibility, every combination, will be repeated an infinite number of times. If this exact moment, this exact me exactly writing this same sentence has been and will be repeated an infinite number of times, also all the other possibilities for this exact moment will as well. If all possibilities are repeated, what is really being repeated is the diversity of all possibilities. And this is too overwhelming for morality, because morality only makes sense for this moment. (Here one ought to consider morality unencumbered by the juridical forms of what Hegel calls Moralität). This is a necessity without content: the “same” means here also “different”. But, even a stronger form of necessity could be applied to the Eternal Recurrence that Nietzsche does not incorporate into his project: necessity in the Eternal Recurrence would be a concrete order of the repetition of all possibilities, a series of repetitions. If it is a random, senseless, repetition of all events, we cannot know among all possibilities which one we are being, that is, becoming. None of them must, as a matter of necessity,  happen this time. The call for self-overcoming nihilism through the eternal recurrence, gives meaning to every decision as a choice for one possibility.

If one overcame oneself, and at the same time, overcame the nihilism of the absence of a metaphysical normativity, namely God, one would be oneself –that exact self– every time that that possibility is repeated: hence, one is giving life to this oneself in each moment. The “I” means a willful becoming of “oneself”. A self-fashioning. To love what you will be anyway makes no sense, it is just nihilism with mathematical combinations, so to speak, but from the point of view of the experience of the moment, the moment of questioning the Being of the World and the will, it does indeed make sense because in that “noon” one wants to be oneself, for ever. The question then is: which repetition do you want to be?

Löwith, on the contrary, claims that “put in moral terms: I am responsible for everything’s being there and being as it is, and there is no being there that would be responsible for its being as it is and its being there. The contradiction between both sets of assertions could only be nullified and brought to a non-contradictory correspondence if Nietzsche succeeded in flying beyond all going, going over, going under, into the innocence of heaven”.

However, then, the importance of Nietzsche’s idea of eternity is essential to understand what the modern world seeks, and how the powers of men are not enough to make them stand by themselves. The sheer will (to power or to whatever) is not enough. God was once the basis for these powers to work; now that modern man has murdered Him, a new transcendence is needed. Although, Nietzsche’s attempt was ultimately not successful in Löwith’s view: “What can be learned from his teaching is not ready-made results but rather the indispensability of certain issues of the philosophy of nature that result, historically, from the fact that the old, biblical God is dead for modern man’s consciousness. [...] It is the result of the loss of a theological answer”.

Pensant en Dietari, English, Filosofia
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26 · 03 · 2010

“Second-and-a-halfness”

(On Peirce’s Categories and the Community of Inquirers)

I

-Science as a social process-

One of the main characteristics of Peirce’s philosophy of science is its social dimension. Against Cartesian solipsism, Peirce raises a series of counter-arguments that challenge both the intellectual process of attaining a truth–or, at least, a trustworthy conclusion-, grounded in all a priori principles for conception-formation, including principles such as intuition and introspection; and the lonely work of the inquirer, conceived as a genius who reaches definitive certainty through his own mental powers, including the empiricist scope based on sensual experience and the idealist scope based on the strength of reason or on some sort of innate revelation.

Peirce’s theory of cognition involves a kind of realism that, among other things, takes the external world as the only genuine source of knowledge. The negation of interiority as a source of knowledge implies that even the delimitation of the concept of self comes from external forces. These external forces don’t merely comprise facts and objects, but also other subjects and other subjects’ discourses. Consistent with this, Peirce develops the role played by others as testimonies. The role played by testimony is essential in configuring both the idea of the self as well as a dynamic understanding of science.

Let’s start with the idea of the oneself. In one of his early articles (Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man, 1868), Peirce asks and answers several questions concerning the nature of interiority, especially certian of its features such as Intuition, Introspection and Self-consciousness. As he summarizes it in another article : “1. We have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts. 2. We have no power of Intuition, but every cognition is determined logically by previous cognitions”.

Furthermore, in order to answer the question “whether we have an intuitive self-consciousness” he looks for the origin of self-consciousness in the early stages of life and reason, that is early childhood, and he concludes that self-consciousness does not come from innate intuition of the self, but from a contrast between an individual’s apperceptions of the external world -or the absence of them- and the testimonies that others give about their experiences of the world. This contrast produces a consciousness of a difference between Oneself and the Other.

“Thus, he (the child) becomes aware of ignorance, and it is necessary to suppose a self in which this ignorance can inhere. So testimony gives the first dawning of self-consciousness. (…) But, further, although usually appearances are either only confirmed or merely supplemented by testimony, yet there is a certain remarkable class of appearances which are continually contradicted  by testimony. These are those predicates which we  know to be emotional, but which he distinguishes by their connection with the movements of that central person, himself (…). These judgements are generally denied by others. Moreover, he has reason to think that others, also, have such judgements which are quite denied by all the rest. Thus, he adds to the conception of appearance as the actualization of fact, the conception of it as something private and valid only by supposing a self which is fallible”.

This awareness of ignorance and error not only leads the child to infer the existence of himself and the privacy of his emotions, but, as it is implicit, it also corrects his understanding of the external world. A simple transposition of this idea to the level of science gives us a clear image of one of the pillars of Peirce’s thought: the development of science–and thus the attaining of truth–must be confirmed or corrected by others. This self-correcting character of science implies a dynamic conception, in the sense that it is susceptible to change and, also, that its own development fuels that susceptibility. Every movement feeds future movements, as in a dynamo. Moreover, even at a invidual’s level, the process of reasoning, understanding or obtaining conceptions is essentially dynamic. The process of unifying multiple sensorial data in one’s mind does not have a clear origin or a final end either. I’ll try to show a glimpse of this dynamic in what concerns to the scientist process of understanding Science througout Peirce’s categories.

II

-The three categories and the social process of Science-

The three universal categories (Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness) at the basis of Peirce’s Philosophy can be discovered in almost all of his writtings. The extent of the meaning of these terms is great and thus they are difficult to define–at least, in the space of a mini-paper. However, we can safely state, for the sake of our present reflection, some characteristics of them.

Firstness is the quality itself, independent of anything else, the sheer apparence of phenomena, before they are understood or mediated; what is given to the senses before the delimitation of the object they come from. It is absolute freshness, we might call it adamicity. Secondness is the appearence of the fact, its delimitation by its contrast with everything else. Secondness is the emergence of the brute fact, before it becomes intelligible, but also after it has been differentiated from other facts or objects: it is what makes possible awareness of their existence. The existence of a concrete fact in the milieu of other facts means presence in the universe of experiences. It implies a dynamic reaction before all other things in the universe, and therefore fundamentally implies relation. The existence of something has a dyadic character because this existence becomes explicit only through opposition to other: this is its  proper kind of relation. In secondness a thing becomes distinguished from other things through emerging in its real determinacy in relation to all other things and thereby negating all other events, facts or objects as not being part of itself. It can be said, therefore, that there is a sense of violence in Peirce’s secondness.

If firstness offers the possibility of the presence of fact, and secondness its effective presence, thirdness refers to the intelligible aspect of facts. Thirdness pertains to the realm of law, beyond the sensory manifold. It is the “habit” of becoming a habit that a universe in continous development has and manifests in an ever growing magnitude. Thirdness is, then, “that which is as it is as mediate between two others”.

If all conceptions can be fundamentally reduced to these three, then the way in which science evolves can also be reduced to these three categories. An inquirer, a scientist, that tries to advance towards truth will face firstness, secondness and thirdness not only in her approach to facts in the world of nature or the realm of experiments, but also in her relation to science itself.

In Peirce’s opinion, there is no fundamental origin of truth that we can intuitively discover, nor is there a final stage: “there is no absolutely first cognition of any object, but cognition arises by a continuous process. We must begin then, with a process of cognition, and with that process whose laws are best understood and most closely follow external facts”.

Science is an ongoing process of correction and self-correction, and the openness of scientific theories lies in the possibility for them to be negated, in the possibility of demonstrating that a theory or simple proposition is false. Truth is as dynamic as science is.

Faced with a prevalent scientific theory an inquirer is the other in relation to the theory. She must serve as an affirmative or negative testimony of it. In this scenario a temporarily valid truth–namely, the corpus of a tradition at any given time- is a phenomenon that every inquirer faces.

Notwithstanding the fact that a scientific theory or a scientific law belongs to the sphere of thirdness, because they are precisely the hypothetically understood reality, the corpus of a scientific tradition at any given time–before every branch of science or every theorem are even differenciated–can be understood as playing the role of firstness in the inquirer’s mind. Scientific tradition is the quality of truth independent of anything else, a sheer apparence of a phenomena that is faced when a human being decides to devote herself to the search for truth.

Consecutively, a theory becomes present in relation to all other knowledge. It becomes different, distinct, in opposition not only to other theories but also in opposition to oneself. It is a form of testimony that reciprocally delimitates the knowledge that occupies the space within the community of inquirers and the consciousness of oneself as an inquirer. This is the secondness of science. One becomes aware at the same time of the fact of a theory as opposed to other theories, and the radical opposition between the inquirer that onelself is, and the theory she is examining. It is just after this moment of awareness that logic acts. In the process of making a theory intelligible, (that is, between the secondness and the thirdness of the understanding of a theory), logic plays the role of making sense of the internal consistency of its truth claims.

We are not yet at the stage of testing the truth of a theory through testing its content in a lab experiment, but only at the stage of testing its formal validity. This moment of logical examination could be called “second-and-a-halfness”. A moment in which doubt can arise or remain silent. If doubt arises, it is not to be understood as a subjective insecurity but as an objective problem in the theory qua fact. And, hence, in the mind of the author of such a theory: “if disciplined and candid minds carefully examine a theory and refuse to accept it, this ought to create doubts in the mind of the author”. Second-and-a-halfness is not a new category, it is just a midle stage that shares something with secondness, namely, the apparence of distinctiveness, and something with thirdness, namely the outcropping intelligibility of the object. It expresses the dunamikos of the inquiry. Its is the form of a scientific, reasonable, doubt. Finally, thirdness appears. Either as conception of the internal error of the theory or as a conception of the consistency of that theory.

Beyond this point, multiple paths are open, but all of them lead to one of the following two directions: correction or affirmation of the theory. If the thirdness of this process is equal to the formulation of the theory examined, then there only remains the possibility of testing its content. If they are not equal, then, first it is necessary to find which is the reason for doubting the logic of a theory, and then to correct it. After that correction, the examination of the matter of the theory is necessary because a logical correction would be a mere disagreement that could not explain anything about the matter that the theory addresses: this would leave the relation between the inquirer and the theory incomplete.  And, also, obviously, the content must be examined in order to see whether the inquirer is in front of a minor addition or, on the contrary, the whole theory must be considered untrue, and a new hypothesis is to arise from the process.

III

-The explicitness of logic as loyalty to a community and commitment to polemos-

Logic, however, is not a natural way of thinking. The existence of it as a science is proof  of its artificiality, but, even more, the existence and description of fallacies mean that human beings naturally tend to reason illogically without being aware of it. Therefore, logic serves as an explicit law of reasoning. The key word here is “explicit”, because in the process of examining a theory it is necessary to overcome the mere opinion one has about it, or the feeling of agreement or disagreement, and logic must be employed deliberately. Hence, logic serves also as an objective set of rules that makes it possible to leave opinion aside. Logic lives in the space created between the community of inquirers and its effective channel of comunication. It is, as it were, the constitution of the community of inquirers, a community that aims at the real.

“And what do we mean by the real? It is a conception which we must first have had when we discovered that here was an unreal, an illusion; that is, when we first corrected ourselves. Now the distinction for which alone this fact logically called, was between an ens relative to private inward determinations, to the negations belonging to idiosyncrasy, and an ens such as would stand in the long run. The real is that which, sonner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge. And so those two series of cognitions -the real and the unreal- consist of those which, at a time sufficiently future, the community will always continue to reaffirm; and of those which, under the same conditions, will ever after be denied”.

Therefore, logic is the rule to which a member of such a community must obey in order to be loyal to the community, in order to be a patriot, a committed citizen, to turn the personal, private, intransferible subjective experiences into commune, public and transferible objective knowledge.

Nevertheless, the stage of second-and-a-halfness, this state of doubt, asks for the explicitation of logic to be able to critique the scientific tradition, that is, the assumed truth. In this explicitation there is a will to challenge every sign, every proposition, and every argument that configure a theory and, more in general, to challenge the conception of truth at a given time. Aware of herself and her role thanks to ignorance and error, an inquirer must assume that her nature is equal to other inquirers’ nature. “The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation”.

Her own being as negation must become negation of other’s being as negation. She must be testimony for others. He must compete against others. The need for explicit logic thus implies a commitment to polemos. True patriots to this COMMUNITY are those who, within the rules of the method of science, make their experiences compete, make their errors challenge each other’s reciprocally. Those who assume imperfection as the only vehicle to go along the path towards truth are the only true members of the community of inquirers. Those who always return to the stage of second-and-a-halfness are the ones who lead in such a path:

“This is a man,

proud man,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,

His glassy essence”.

¹ Peirce, Charles S Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, In: The Essential Peirce Volume I (1867-1893), Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. pp 30

² Peirce, Charles S. Questions Conerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man , In: The Essential Peirce Volume I (1867-1893). Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. pp 20.

³ Houser, Nathan, Introduction to The Essential Peirce Volume I (1867-1893), Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. pp XXX

⁴ Peirce, Charles S Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, In: The Essential Peirce Volume I (1867-1893), Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.. pp 30

⁵ Peirce, Charles S., Some Consequences of Four Incapacities In: The Essential Peirce Volume I (1867-1893), Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. pp 29

^6”…mere desagreement (unrecognized) does not constitue relation, and therefore of the second kind are only brought into relation by correspondence in fact”. On a new list of categories, In: The Essential Peirce Volume I (1867-1893), Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. pp 7.

⁷ Peirce, Charles S., Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, In: The Essential Peirce Volume I (1867-1893), Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. pp 52

⁸ Peirce, Charles S., Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, In: The Essential Peirce Volume I (1867-1893), Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. pp 55

⁹ To challenge the method itself would open up a new set of questions and problems. Essentially, it would raise the question of radically different paradigms and the possibilities of their comparison or communication. Would it polemos even possible?

¹⁰ Peirce, Charles S., Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, In: The Essential Peirce Volume I (1867-1893), Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. pp 55.

Pensant en English, Filosofia
Ningú no s'ha pronunciat encara

22 · 03 · 2010

Talking monkeys

Pensant en Butlletins, Política
6 han dit

15 · 03 · 2010

El Príncep català

Pensant en Butlletins, Política
2 han dit

08 · 03 · 2010

Il·lustracions de l’Oriol Malet per a la secció de Rac1

L’Oriol Malet és l’il·lustrador oficial de la secció sobre NY que faig a Rac1. El talent de l’Oriol només el supera la seva generositat.

www.oriolmalet.com

Podeu escoltar les seccions aquí: http://rac1.org/elmon/seccions/nova-york-a-quarts-de-15/

Pensant en Coses vistes, Dietari
2 han dit

També som polítics

Pensant en Butlletins, Política
7 han dit

02 · 03 · 2010

Notes de NY 35: Idees d’un dia sol

Mahler 3a Simfonia, 1er moviment

I.

El Pablo em va trucar ahir per dir-me que li sobrava una entrada per anar a veure la 3a simfonia de Mahler al Carnegie Hall. M’he llevat amb aquest pensament fresc, però tard. Ahir vaig anar a dormir a les tantes, entretingut per un mal humor general i inversemblants articles de remotes pàgines web. He llegit una mica de Peirce al matí, res, uns articles sobre el pragmatisme americà del segle XIX, i també uns capítols del llibre “Lenguages of Art” de Goodman, un teòric de la percepció i la representació en l’art. Venia als Estats Units buscant aquesta mena de filosofia analítica, i puc dir que la serenitat dels arguments lògics em calma. He sortit de casa a saltirons, escoltant Kevin Johansen als meus auriculars nous. Gel al carrer, mans a les butxaques. M’he comprat un plàtan i un suc de poma.

Un cop al vagó de la línia 3, direcció downtown, he canviat la música per escoltar Savall, que és el que menys em distreu de llegir i he continuat “Our Man in La Havana” de Graham Greene. El trobo cruel i divertit alhora, i té un anglès que m’omple el pit d’olors. La batalla est-oest dels espies, el comunisme i l’americanisme, troben el seu ridícul en els culs calents i generosos de Cuba i en les peripècies patètiques dels suposats espies de Sa Majestat. Em va passar el mateix quan vaig llegir “The Secret Agent”, també de Greene, ara farà tres anys. Aleshores, però, la befa era sobre la pedanteria anarquista i el terrorisme de l’acció directa.

El darrer tram fins a la universitat l’he de fer a peu, i hi ha gel carrer: he de caminar a poc a poc per no relliscar i m’he posat Leonard Cohen a les orelles per portar el ritme rogallós dels dies densos. El cel blanquíssim i jo caminant un pèl cap-cot, per veure el terra i els entrebancs. He pensat aleshores que està bé això de poder riure del comunisme i dels jocs d’espies. Tot plegat és una de les ficcions més divertides, sobretot per a nosaltres, que no el vam haver de combatre ni de patir en la pròpia pell. Suposo que Greene devia de ser irreverent quan publicava. Hom es defineix pels gegants als quals s’enfronta de cara al públic. Potser és per això que hi ha qui enyora que els capellans facin missa de cara al Santíssim i no de cara als cada cop més minvants feligresos i a les seves canes cada cop més nombroses.

II

La primera classe bé. “Mirrors of Nature”, la dóna el professor Zed Adams, un home jove, amb barba de Kevin Smith. Sembla ben bé Bob el silenciós, però té un to de veu poderós, perquè és alt, que se sent perfectament des de la darrera fila, que és on jo sec amb l’ordinador encès i 10 pantalles obertes mentre prenc apunts. La qüestió del dia era si la semblança és un requisit suficient i necessari per a què una cosa en representi una altra.

La resposta és no. Perquè no totes les coses que s’assemblen es representen les unes a les altres, perquè les coses que s’assemblen a allò que representen també s’assemblen a d’altres coses que no representen pas, i perquè hi ha incomptables coses que en representen visualment d’altres i que no s’hi assemblen pas. El tema de fons és si el realisme en l’art té a veure amb la proximitat de l’objecte artístic amb l’objecte real que vol representar, o si, més aviat, el realisme és una qüestió mental, psicològica, un seguit de convencions d’un temps i en un lloc en un grup de subjectes particulars. L’art com a experiència individual i incomunicable. O no. Resumint molt.

III

Després, la classe del vell Bernstein. Richard Bernstein, tothom l’anomena “Dick”. És l’antic cap del departament, ex-assistent de Hannah Arendt, i un home que se centra massa sovint en la sornegueria de l’anècdota, en la lluita contra faccions fantasmals que ja no l’ataquen, i en digressions i parèntesis massa llargs per a un com jo, que tendeix a la dispersió. Per com parla de la Hannah Arendt hom diria que van follar.  O que a ell li hagués agradat. La classe ha estat bé, tercera ja sobre Peirce, el gran filòsof americà i pare del pragmatisme. Una filosofia de les conseqüències, del “per a què?” més que del “per què?”, una filosofia des de la ciència i una filosofia del dubte real i radical. És argumentable que els EUA s’han construït sobre aquests pilars. Graham Greene se’n riuria, però poc.

En sortir he enfilat cap a la zona del Carnegie, a esperar el Pablo mentre continuava llegint sobre els falsos espies de l’Havana. La ficció dins de la ficció va decantant-se cap a la cruel realitat i no puc parar de somriure davant d’una hamburguesa poc feta i un got d’aigua de l’aixeta. Escolto Savall.

Al galliner del Carnegie Hall el primer moviment de la 3a simfonia ha sonat esplendorós. Diuen els experts i també el programa de mà que és la primera gran creació de Mahler. M’han sonat risibles les seves frases extretes de cartes a algun amic segons les quals ell no creava pas, sinó que la creació venia d’enfora i ell n’era només l’instrument. Aquest és el romanticisme decadent de finals del XIX, ingenu en les formulacions d’un món verge de la massificació de la pedanteria.

La seva biografia diu que va compondre la peça a una cabana espartana, enmig d’un silenci litúrgic, patològic, racional. Pocs aliments i molta obsessió. També jo passo moltes estones en silenci darrerament; callant, més ben dit; però rodejat de tota mena de sorolls i paraules. Potser per aixó és impossible d’escriure res sencer, i el que em cal  és la inversió dels termes: quietud exterior i cicló interior.

“Què em diuen les flors”, “Què em diuen els animals”, “Què em diu l’amor”, “Què em diu Déu”, aquestes són les preguntes a les quals responen els moviments de la simfonia més majestuosa que he sentit des que vaig sentir la 5a de Bethoveen al Palau de la Música. No en sé de música, però m’estremeixo com un paper de fumar i se’m clouen els ulls.

El primer moviment, la força dels metalls i de la multitud de músics a l’escenari, i la perversió d’unes notes que auguren una total descomposició del món. Al caire del barranc, equilibris.

El darrer moviment, el teològic, lentíssim, ple de sons cremosos, benevolents, sense sentit de l’humor, però amb el públic ja derrotat, obert de bat a bat, assedegat de qualsevol transcendència. M’he emocionat.

Em passa amb d’altres energies del segle XIX: la indústria i Nietzsche; el nihilisme rus i la poesia romanticosa.

Justament ahir vaig acabar de llegir l’Ecce Homo, de Nietzsche. Feia anys que no en llegia res i em va provocar una onada de gratitud per l’esforç i un gran sentiment de pena. Miro el món d’ara i el veig fred, m’aboco a qualsevol cosa d’aleshores i em torno un sentimental. En el programa de mà expliquen una conclusió a la qual van arribar juntament Mahler i Freud sobre un trauma de la seva infància i la influència que va tenir en la música que composà d’adult. Quina bellesa angèlica del causa-efecte, del cientificisme. M’entren ganes de dur tirants.

Al bell mig de la sinfonia una mezzo-soprano americana ha cantat els famosos versos de l’Així Parlà Zaratrusta de Nietzsche que Mahler va incloure en la partitura. L’home com a producte del desplegament de l’ésser natural. I una lluita de la dissonància per sortir i esclatar.

IV

Els moviments del mig han estat menys emocionants i he aprofitat per prendre-li els prismàtics al Pablo i repassar els músics d’un en un. Al darrere, esperant per el breu moment en el penúltim moviment, els dos cors comptaven els minuts: un de dones vestides de negre, i un de nens amb camises blanques i llacets. Només n’he detectat un d’adormit. Però m’han provocat una gran tristesa. La música hi ha ajudat, esclar, bressolant-me, encantant el cinisme com una fetillera amb escot.  Nens de 9 anys amb cara de freaks, monstres de fira, deformats. Els seus cossos semblaven absents i les seves mirades es concentraven en el director d’orquestra: tots teníen el cap tirat endavant. Però no era un gest, era una posició permament, una deformació de la columna. Espatlles caigudes, mans flàccides, galtes terses, ulls sense cap malícia. Fills dels seus pares sobretot, ficats a cantaires sense encara haver pogut pensar què és aquesta tensió que després anomenem vocació.

M’han recordat als nens de la darrera pel·lícula del Haneke, “The White Ribbon” que vam anar a veure la setmana passada amb el Juan i en Matt. Nens protestants de 1914 en un poble semi-feudal del nord d’Alemanya. L’ou de la serp, segons Haneke. Potser només la violència adulta, transvassada als nens en forma de jocs mortals. I arguments massa grans -totals- per a un sol ésser humà, tingui l’edat que tingui.

V

El darrer moviment, el diví, ens ha deixat exhausts i extasiats. Quin gust, tu. El Pablo quasi s’ennuega: “no sabía si algo me estaba subiendo por la garganta, o si había algo que tenia que bajar y se había quedado atrapado, obstruyéndome la respiración”. Poètica científica, i tenia els ulls vidriosos. Però se’n fot d’ell mateix, i això el fa la companyia perfecta. Quan hem marxat m’ha semblat que havia crescut dos centímetres, com a mínim.

Jo volia anar a fer una cervesa, però el Pablo havia d’anar a casa per acabar de preparar la classe sobre Aristòtil que ha de donar demà a quarts de nou del matí a un College a 30 kilòmetres de la seva casa de Brooklyn. Hi va amb un Mercedes deixat, del 1989. Ja té tancament centralitzat i finestres automàtiques. 1989.

Estava a punt de quedar-me insatisfet quan ha dit: “es la mejor interpretación que he oído nunca de esta pieza, de largo”. I amb això he pogut passejar tranquil fins a Times Square -15 carrers i el vent i el gel- a buscar el metro.

VI

La interpretació brillant és deguda al director de l’orquestra, el reconegudíssim Mariss Jansons. Letó, format a Leningrad, Moscou, Viena i Salzburg. Al 1979 va emigrar a Oslo i d’allà cap a una rentable i aplaudida carrera de director. (La Filarmònica de Londres, de Filadèlfia i ara dirigeix la Royal Concertgebow Orchestra, d’Amsterdam, que diu el Pablo que té la millor secció de vents del món).

Aquesta data m’ha quedat marcada al cervell: 1979. 10 anys abans de la caiguda del Mur de Berlín. 1979, fugir. Li he xiuxiuejat al Pablo, abans del concert, mentre els músics afinaven: “el sovietisme va servir per formar genis en el rigor i que després es fessin rics a Nova York”. Al carrer, quan ja ens acomiadàvem amb una esplèndida abraçada ritual, encara ha tingut temps de dir-me: “Rachmaninoff també va venir als EUA, va fer una gira de 40 concerts i va guanyar tants diners que es va comprar una townhouse a l’East River, on va poder passar la resta dels seus dies remugant malhumorat i mirant el riu”.

Està moda això de les generacions. Suposo que és conseqüència de l’augment de l’esperança de vida. Fins a tres i quatre generacions conviuen en un mateix moment, i el traspàs de poder d’una generació a un altre és cada cop més difús i més tard. És argumentable que viure uns mateixos esdeveniments històrics deu configurar una visió del món, o un seguit d’horitzons de referència, o un conjunt d’espectatives. La generació de la posguerra, el pà negre; la generació del 68, l’aburgesament insatisfet i les ànsies de lliberalitat; etcètera.

I la generació de 1979? I la generació de després de la caiguda del mur deu anys més tard, al 1989? He escrit a d’altres bandes que la meva generació es caracteritza per ser la primera que no va ser educada en el franquisme. Pot ser serà rellevant en el futur que una generació ja no hagi tingut cap professor educat en el franquisme. Marcs mentals, tot plegat, nuclis de significació que dibuixen un temps. També soc aquest Nova York decadent post-11 de Setembre. Els feliços anys zero, abans de la crisi, m’han format.

Arribo a Times Square i em deixo embadalir per les llums. Em sento un borinot, voldria encastar-me en una pantalla gegant.

Més Mahler

VII

Baixo a l’estació, agafo l’express cap a Harlem i trec el diari de la motxilla. Hi ha un article de Thomas L. Friedman titulat 1977 vs.1979 que parla de la batalla interna de l’Islam. No puc evitar somriure. El número em persegueix. I el tema també. L’any passat vaig dedicar mesos i mesos a entendre l’Islam i les seves faccions. Sense massa èxit.

Al 1977 hi va haver una reacció a l’interior de l’Islam davant de la desfeta continuada contra Israel i l’endarreriment manifest dels  països de majoria musulmana. El President d’Egipte l’Anwar Sadat, que va fer un viatge a Israel, promulgava una política de lliberalització, de conciliació amb Occident, de…

Però només dos anys més tard, el 1979, va esdevenir-se la revolució a l’Iran i els fonamentalistes van prendre el control de la Gran Mesquita de la Mecca. Els Wahabites, un cop presa la bastilla, vull dir la Meca, van arrencar a la família reial saudita un compromís per a poder imposar les puríssimes normes socials que encara avui son motiu de terror. L’arribada simultània al poder de l’Ayatolà Khomeini a l’Iran van assentar els dos bàndols, els xiíties- majoria a l’Iran- i els sunites-  majoria a l’Aràbia Saudí- com a competidors per a l’hegemonia de la regió. El drama d’Iraq és també aquest drama. Però és que, a més, l’any 1979, l’any en què el director Mariss Jansons marxava de l’URSS, l’exèrcit soviètic va envaïr l’Afghanistan. Els talibans van resistir amb l’ajuda saudita i nord-americana. Osama Bin Laden és fill d’això i de les universitats més prestigioses d’occident, plenes de l’elit de la zona. Nihilisme occidental més nihilisme jihad. Dues decadències xocant a Manhattan. És l’únic que tenen en comú.

Friedman diu que la guerra 1977 vs 1979 a l’interior de l’Islam encara cueja. I que del que es tracta és d’aconseguir que finalment el 1977 guanyi. Un 1977 representat pels joves manifestants iranians, que es juguen la vida contra el règim teocràtic de Khomeini i Ahmadineyad. Joves nascuts aleshores. Joves nascuts després del 1979. Generacions marcades per una espectativa frustrada.

No hi estic d’acord. Com Ortega, penso que les coses que han estat superades una vegada, seran superades tantes vegades com tornin a instaurar-se. El 1979 col·lapsarà amb alguna cosa nova, alguna cosa que no pot ser l’esperança de 1977, quan els joves d’aleshores, avui poderosos o exiliats, encara no estaven tan desencantats amb Occident i la seva política exterior. Amèrica i la seva presència. Europa i la seva absència.

VIII

A mitja tarda, abans d’anar cap al Carnegie m’he trobat amb un company de classe, del qual mai no puc recordar el nom. Vam anar junts al seminari sobre Hobbes. És Iranià, però viu a Holanda des que és un nen. Els seus pares van fugir. És aquí amb una beca per a la inclusió dels estrangers als Paísos Baixos, que procura que els fills de la immigració puguin arribar a les cotes més altes de l’educació universitària. És llest i treballador, i un pèl tarambana. Duia uns cascos Boose connectats al seu Iphone. Van costar-li més de 300 dòlars. Fan el buit. No sents res del carrer, i la música, sobretot els greus, se sent que és un delit.

L’any passat, després d’una classe del Simon Chritchely a la qual jo assistia d’oient, vam anar tots plegats a fer una cervesa a un bar que es diu Spain. Gallecs fugits de l’Espanya del 1960 que van fundar un antro per servir truites de patata i cervesa Estrella. Li vaig preguntar per la seva identitat, i em va dir: “soc Iranià i parlo parsi, però sé que moriré a Amsterdam i sé que seré enterrat a Amsterdam”. El vaig gravar amb una càmera que tenia abans de perdre-la definitivament i tinc a mig muntar un vídeo sobre les drogues a Nova York, en el qual se’l sent repetides vegades dient: “Sé que moriré a Amsterdam i sé que seré enterrat a Amsterdam”.

Sortint del metro, amb els meus ariculars de 139 dòlars (no fan el buit), amb el diari plegat sota el braç, tot a les fosques, m’aturo en un deli que hi ha al costat de la mesquita de la meva illa de cases. Necessito un carregador de mòbil. Al darrera del dependent hi ha una enganxina que diu: “I love the Profet”. El cor ha estat esborrat, però s’endevina el seu rastre en blanc. El vermell, color sagrat de l’Islam: suposo que és la raó de la seva desaparició en l’enganxina. A la ferreteria del costat hi ha un cartell que diu: “aquesta ferreteria col·labora amb el Departament de Policia de NY en l’operació antiterrorista xxxx, informant sobre compres sospitoses”. I al costat hi ha una caixa amb una ranura a la part superior: “Donacions per a la mesquita”.

IX

A casa, el Matt està embadal·lit mirant la pantalla del seu ordinador. Jo l’imito en pocs minuts i em poso a escriure això. La tecnologia, penso, derrotarà el 1979. La tecnologia és de les poques coses provinents d’Occident que l’Islam radical no considera impures. El seu relat teològic i filòsofic diu que la nostra modernitat és una còpia dels seus autors tardo-medievals. Connexions entre Descartes, Leibniz, Kant i pensadors musulmans han estat provades, segons els seus intel·lectuals, fonamentalistes o no. La tecnologia tendeix a donar-te poder. I és individual, cada cop més atomitzada. Un mòbil, un ordinador, uns auriculars que fan el buit i et deixen sol amb la teva música. El poder de la individualitat és  la possibilitat de la crítica. No hi ha govern que pugui amb això. La tecnologia expandeix la consciència i els seus gadgeto- braços. Mahler en una cabana espartana buscant silenci. L’impossible comunicació de l’experiència artística que avui explicava Zed Adams a classe. La fi de la metafísica compartida en el pragmatisme de Dick Bernstein. El director Jansons fugint de la massa soviètica gràcies a la seva genialitat. Graham Greene, enfotent-se dels espies fidels a la pàtria.

Alço el cap.

-Ei, Matt, has sopat?

-No. Et faràs alguna cosa?

-És que per mi sol em fa mandra cuinar.

-M’apunto.

Ja són les 12.

Mahler, més.

Pensant en Coses vistes, notes de NY
6 han dit