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Giambattista Vico on rhetoric and the barbarism of reflection.
Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza.
Vinson Cunningham on Kash Patel’s odd press conference
Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest.
Much too late, I’ve finally read Pankaj Mishra’s The World after Gaza, a moving and humane work of great erudition. I knew it was so, but having actually read it now, it fully hits home how some of its reviewers stateside were totally illiterate. I’m trying to organize an interview with the author very soon, so I will keep most of my remarks for that, but I just want to share one of the many interesting quotations and episodes Mishra unearths. I was particularly struck by the transformation Mishra charts of the New York intellectual Alfred Kazin’s attitudes towards Israel, and this prophetic entry from his journal:
The present period off Jewish ‘success’ will some day be remembered as the greatest irony…The Jews caught in a trap, the Jews murdered, and bango! Out of the ashes all this inescapable lament and exploitation of the Holocaust…Israel and the Jews’ ‘safeguard’; the Holocaust as our new Bible, more than a Book of Lamentations.
My latest obsession with the art of rhetoric has gotten me interested again in Giambattista Vico, one of the oddest characters in European intellectual history. A professor of law in Naples, which by the 18th century was a bit of a backwater, he mounted a lonely crusade against the rise of Cartesian science and “the geometric method,” insisting the old humanistic tradition of rhetoric provided the best tools to understand civic life and history. According to Vico, human societies were not composed according to the laws of physics, but must be understood through myth, poetry, and religion. His magnum opus, The New Science, proposes a cyclical theory of history where man goes through a series of stages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. The final stage, that of democracy, is characterized by the rule of irony and self-consciousness. Eventually, this would break down, and man would return to the poetic phase. Describing this process as “the barbarism of reflection,” Vico has one of my favorite passages, I think ever:
But if the peoples are rotting in this last civil illness and cannot agree upon a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand. For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus in the midst of their greatest festivities, though physically thronging together, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits, that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. For the latter displayed a generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight or be on one's guard; but the former, with a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates. Hence people who have reached this point of premeditated malice, when they receive this last remedy of providence and are thereby stunned and brutalized, are sensible no longer of comforts, delicacies, pleasures and pomp, but only of the sheer necessities of life. And the few survivors in the midst of an abundance of the things necessary for life naturally become well behaved and, returning to the primitive simplicity of the first world of peoples, are again religious, truthful and faithful. Thus providence brings back among them the piety, faith and truth which are the natural foundations of justice as well as the graces and beauties of the eternal order of God.
To understand Vico better, I went looking for books on him, and found one I like, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric by Michael Mooney:
Reasoning, [Vico] saw belongs to the fabric of life. When men act publicly, or when. they urge a course of action upon others, they must be readywith their reasons. Reasons are most readily given, adherence to one’s views is most easily won, by compelling assent through demonstration, by showing through a line of unbroken argument that what one holds is implied in intuited truths. Such clarity, however, is rarely available in everyday life. “To introduce geometrical method into practical life,” wrote Vico, “is ‘like trying to go mad with the rules of reason’ [Ter. Eun.62—{63], attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, as though human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance. Similarly, to arrange a political speech according to the precepts of geometrical method is equivalent to stripping it of any acute remarks and to uttering nothing but pedestrian lines of argument.”
Some would do well to note that.
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