Reader's Digest: July 1, 2023
“Katabasis” is the Greek word for a descent into the underworld. Think Juno, Ceres, Orpheus, et al. “Anabasis” is its antonym: coming up out of the depths. The most famous Anabasis is not mythical: it’s the conquest of Persia by Cyrus, chronicled by Xenophon. But anabasis can function as a metaphor, too, as it does in Rachel Eisendrath’s wonderful essay, “New York Anabasis,” in the latest Yale Review.
Eisendrath writes ecstatically about visual artists who disdain the depths of introspection to revel in the warmth of crowds: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in the Dutch Renaissance, and Leon Kossoff, in the twentieth century. “What Bruegel wanted to show,” she writes, “was not the internal life of the individual but the external life of the group—that is, communal life, life lived in the indefinite article.”
But for Eisendrath, you can’t have one without the other:
To muse from within a solitary room, to try to find a ground of being that includes only your thought in relation to itself, will always be a false thought experiment—for, isolated in that fashion, without a past, who would be recognizably human? (In reality, or at least in New York City, the upstairs neighbors would have interrupted Descartes’s thinking by trampling about irritatingly overhead; the hot water pipes would have annoyed him by beginning to bang just when he was about to formulate some pithy claim about the thinking ego.)
To revisit Donald Antrim, amending Descartes: “I feel, therefore we are.”
Another essay at the intersection of philosophy and art: Terry Eagleton on Ludovico Silva, analyzing Marx’s literary style, in the London Review of Books:
As a young man Marx wanted to be a poet, not a political theorist, and wrote some floridly Romantic verses to his future wife, Jenny, which the Venezuelan philosopher Ludovico Silva describes … as ‘endearingly bad’. … He also produced a mediocre verse tragedy … as well as a fragment of fiction deeply indebted to the greatest of English anti-novels, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
I once made fun of Eagleton’s own prose style, a machine gun of facetious similes. There are some instances in this review:
If style expresses the soul of an author, dissecting it may seem impertinent, rather like dissecting someone’s appearance. … Roland Barthes speaks of literary style as plunging to the depths of the body, which makes it sound as personal as one’s internal organs.
But the bulk is unusually earnest: an interpretation of the place of art in Marx’s political thinking.
Unlike most realists, Marx does not see art as precious because it reflects reality. On the contrary, it is most relevant to humanity when it is an end in itself. Art is a critique of instrumental reason. … In its free, harmonious expression of human powers, art is a prototype of what it is to live well. It is radical not so much because of what it says as because of what it is …. an image of non-alienated labour …
On this reading, art is central to human flourishing:
Art prefigures a future in which human energies can exist simply for their own delight. Where art was, there shall humanity be.
But if the point is “to convert life into art [by] fully realising one’s capacities,” we must do this “reciprocally, through the equal self-expression of others.”
Or, as The Communist Manifesto puts it, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. This is the way [Marx] converts an essentially aristocratic ethic into communism.