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Here is part 4 in a series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America," drawn from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus at the International Conference on Narrative in Cleveland last month. In a previous post (part 3, found here), Marcus talked about the deep continuities and themes that emerged, seemingly of their own accord, to lend structure to the book. In this post, he discusses instead a significant decision the editors made—inviting Carolyn Porter to write a single essay on both Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind—that shaped the book. Porter’s essay may be read here. Part 1 of the series is here; part 2 is here. The next post will conclude this series.

Photograph of the Pharr Plantation house near Social Circle, Georgia, built in 1840, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1937 for the U. S. Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

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It was a kind of accident that John Rockwell’s essay on Porgy and Bess, Carolyn Porter’s on Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind, and Adam Bradley’s on the meeting between Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes in Harlem fall together—and speak to and through each other. Certainly no one said, let’s put them together—not even to see what happens. We went through the history of the country, debated year by year, event by event, and those three emerged out of 1935 and 1936. Their particular dates—the premiere of the opera, the publication of the books, the encounter outside the Apollo Theater—came together as other possibilities were put aside. No one was thinking about race, let alone synchronicity, let alone the great social movement that would be the spine of the book. But making a single essay out of Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind wasn’t throwing cards up in the air—it was playing a hand.

We wanted writers to surprise us, to surprise readers, but also to surprise themselves, as they dove into the question they’d been asked. Did Carolyn Porter know, when she started her essay on Gone With the Wind and Absalom Absalom!, that both William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell would describe their stories in the same way, in almost exactly the same words? People imagine the South, Porter quotes Faulkner as saying, as “a makebelieve region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds that perhaps never existed anywhere”—even as, Porter says, he was “intent on understanding it, committed to getting at the truth behind the legend.” And Mitchell said of her book—her only book:

I have been embarrassed on many occasions by finding myself included among writers who pictured the south as a land of white-columned mansions

—in the book, Tara has no columns—

whose wealthy owners had thousands of slaves and drank thousands of juleps. I have been surprised, too, for North Georgia was certainly no such country—if it ever existed anywhere… But people believe what they like to believe and the mythical Old South has too strong a hold on their imaginations to be altered by the mere reading of a 1,037 page book.

Absalom, Absalom! was Faulkner’s ninth novel. He was a more than established literary figure. The book had a first printing of 6000 copies, while Gone with the Wind sold 1,700,000 copies in its first year. Porter notes that when Faulkner, working in Hollywood, heard that Mitchell had been paid $50,000 for the film rights to her book—readers were casting Clark Gable as Rhett in their imaginations before the producers did—Faulkner announced he expected $100,000 for his. He later tried to sell it to other screenwriters, for $50,000, playing up the sensationalistic angle: “It’s about miscegenation.”

But Faulkner was playing a different game, too. Porter begins with a conversation in Absalom, Absalom! between Mississipian Quentin Compson and his northern Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon: “Tell me about the South,” Shreve says. “What it’s like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”

“Lacking the millions of readers Mitchell would command,” Porter writes, “Faulkner simply situated Quentin and Shreve as readers of the Southern past inside the covers of his novel, thereby representing an audience he knew his novel would never have.”

“An audience he knew his novel would never have”—that phrase rings down through all of American literary history, capturing the writer who knows it is his or her obligation to speak to everyone, fearing he or she will be heard by no one, and so creating characters to represent an audience he knew he would never have. But in that obscurity, that darkness, is safety—that is where the writer goes when he or she is afraid he or she may be afraid of the noise of his or her own words.

Gone with the Wind, Porter writes, was anything but a match for the South depicted in the works of the southern historians who, from the end of Reconstruction on, up to the 1960s, in essence won the Civil War for the Confederacy by rewriting it—and by playing on the racism of America, that legacy of slavery, as a whole. The fall of Tara and Scarlett’s return to it was, Porter writes, a Depression allegory—and the book had a “miraculous power to disrobe and then re-enshrine the South”; it “enabled its readers… to see through the sham of the aristocratic legend but to see it miraculously revived at the same time.” But “if it was a shared racism that enabled the nation as a whole to unite around the irresistible story of Scarlett O’Hara, it was the same racism that Faulkner set out to excavate in Absalom, Absalom! In the chaotic decades before the Civil War in northern Mississippi, a black and white marriage, an abandoned wife and a spurned black and white son who returns, unknowingly, to marry his white half-sister—it was a trap set for readers, and for the nation itself.

“What had not been faced prior to Absalom, Absalom! Porter says, “is the fact that at the source of the American Dream”—of striving, of opportunity, of nothing is impossible, of each American remaking and inventing him or herself as the nation itself was invented and made up, each individual standing for and embodying the nation itself, re-enacting its whole drama, its whole tragedy—“at the source of the American Dream itself lies slavery.” It was only on the backs of slaves that so-called, self-named Americans could affirm their uniqueness, their mission, their superiority over all the rest of the world and their fellow citizens as well—America, in Lincoln’s words, “the last, best hope of earth.” And that, too, with nothing left out, with no irony—with no scare quotes—was the language of the last entry in the book.

The first of nine images
Kara Walker created for A New Literary History of America’s final entry, “2008, November 4: Barack Obama is
elected 44th President of the United States.”

In the third installment of our series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America," adapted from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus last month at the International Conference on Narrative, Marcus considers a challenge raised at the symposium Writing Cultural History Today, held in 2009 to coincide with the publication of the book, and what that question reveals about the book’s composition and (accidental) structure. At the symposium, a participant said: “This book covers all sorts of subjects. It ranges all over the place. But what it ignores are the great social movements—the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War—that truly shaped the history of the country.” Part 1 can be found here; Part 2 is here; and Parts 4 and 5 will appear soon.

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Thinking about the book in front of us, it became instantly clear that there was one great social movement that more than any other had shaped the country—and that was slavery. The War, Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, might have to continue “Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword”—and it is small-minded to think that that challenge ended when Lee surrendered to Grant. That is a story that began long before Lincoln spoke, and continues to this day.

Slavery and its legacies are not only addressed in the book—they turned out to be the spine of the book. And that spine is what holds it together, if anything does—that spine is what allows all of its limbs and appendages and internal organs and even its mind to work.

We never set out to make that book. This was something the book revealed to us. George Grosz, speaking of his time as a Dadaist in Berlin in 1920, said that “the point was to work completely in the dark.” We were working in the dark. If there was an engine powering the discussions that led to a choice of what subjects to include and which to leave out, the body of that engine might have been knowledge, but the fuel was ignorance. Again and again, as ideas and arguments flew around the table, we were amazed at the stories we were being told, thrilled by what we didn’t know.

There was no intention to make a point by setting Beverly Lowry’s essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin next to Winfried Fluck’s on Brook Farm and Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance next to Liam Kennedy’s on Frederick Douglass’s address “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July”—we didn’t think through the connections between the mid-1840s denial of original sin and the depravity of man, the idea of human perfectionism, spiritualism, and abolitionism that thread through the three essays. The writers didn’t work together to draw their themes together. Working on their own—in the scheme of the book, which no one, the individual authors least of all, could see—they were working in the dark. But they were all, it turned out, sitting around the same table, and they all heard the same spirits knocking.

Lowry begins by talking about the family Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up in, where her father, the great preacher Lyman Beecher, had his ten children sit around the dinner table each night to debate the issues of the day. That table reappears in 1851, when readers waited for each issue of the Era for the next chapter in what began as “Uncle Tom’s Children”—the title, 87 years later, of a book by Richard Wright—the table where, in the words of one letter to the editor, “When the Era arrives, our family, consisting of twelve individuals, is called together to listen to the reading of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’” The table reappears in the common dining hall of Brook Farm; it reappears with Margaret Fox’s spiritualist table in Rochester, New York, in 1852, where Frederick Douglass was a visitor—and, partly because of the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that table explodes into what in 1852 was the largest auditorium in the nation, Rochester’s new Corinthian Hall, where on July 5th—because he refused to speak on July 4th—Douglass gave his great speech to an audience of 700 people.

Lowry’s essay is about the focusing of a national mind, and the search for forms of speech everyone could understand—because in the American republic, in a democracy, that was the task of the American democratic writer.

Incensed by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (the Bloodhound Bill, abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe called it), Stowe slowly began to write, and found her way into a story, Lowry says, “that would rock the country and then the world.” Stowe was afraid to write the story of slavery, to make it real, to, in Lowry’s words, do “the unthinkable”—to affirm or even create that national mind, to transfer “her own sensibility, as a privileged, educated white woman into the consciousness of an enslaved black person,” presenting “the radical notion that slaves were capable of thoughts and feelings similar to hers, and, by extension,” to those of anybody else. “I dreaded to expose even my own mind” to the story she was going to tell, Stowe wrote later—and here again Georges Bataille’s curse against those afraid of the noise of their own words comes into play. And Lowry’s essay becomes a dramatization of how Stowe conquered her fear.

Sometimes a writer doesn’t know what she’s up to. Sometimes work makes its own demands. In cahoots with the work itself, the mind plays its own tricks. To claim our fears and uncertainties, it creates the notion of an attainable task ahead, easily completed. Under that illusion, we begin. And then the job asserts its demands. A short poem becomes a three-act play. A character sketch insists on stretching itself out to become a short story, a novella, sometimes even a novel. Such is almost certainly the case with Mrs. Stowe, who had already begun writing her sketches but perhaps could not imagine herself—a woman, after all, and the mother of seven—the author of a full-length novel.

With Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe searched for the speech that would speak to everyone: in her essay, Lowry emphasizes the way Stowe addresses her readers directly, as “you”—

“If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader,” Stowe wrote, trying to turn her readers into Eliza, “ . . . how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make in those brief few hours, with the darling at your bosom . . .?”

And so it is both a shock of recognition, planted just pages before, but also not really a surprise, to find Liam Kennedy, with no knowledge of the essay that would precede his, emphasizing the same form of address, the discovery of the same national speech, in Douglass’s overpowering address in Rochester. The Fourth of July, Douglass says, “is the birthday of your National Independence, of your political freedom.” But Douglass distances himself from his audience of white abolitionists only to, finally, perform the same act of communing with the dead—in this case, the dead ideals on which the country was founded and that the fact of slavery has so completely betrayed—only to perform the same act of transference Stowe performed, from the other side. At the same time as he distances himself from his audience, he speaks to its members as his “fellow citizens.” As Stowe did, and as Twain would do in Huckleberry Finn, he dramatizes a slave auction, to, Kennedy writes, lead his audience into an “identification with the plight of the slave”—but that is only half of the equation. “In doing so,” Kennedy writes, “he treats the Fourth of July as a symbolic repository of national memory and retells its narrative significance so as to record his own presence and that of Southern slaves within the origins and present crises of the body politic.”

Slavery and its legacies comprise the great social movement of the nation—what has, socially, moved it—and the book is, in part, and in a certain way as a whole, the literary history of that movement. But the cards were thrown up in the air and as they landed they made patterns, and laid themselves one upon the other, in a way that was implicit in the national narrative—but the narrative that emerged was never anyone’s explicit intention. As the book took shape, it wasn’t even necessarily recognized.

Today we conclude our two-part remembrance of the French philosopher Pierre Hadot, who died last week at age 88. Yesterday, Hadot’s friend and former student Michael Chase gave an account of the various turns in Hadot’s intellectual life; today, he shares some personal recollections of a figure whose plainspokenness and accessibility belied the extraordinary sophistication of his mind and work.

Those of you wondering where to look for a good entry point to Hadot’s work might start with What Is Ancient Philosophy?, Chase’s translation of Hadot’s 1995 book Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?, in which Hadot articulated most fully his view on "philosophy as a way of life."

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Pierre Hadot – Part II

By Michael Chase

Having won a grant from the Canadian government to pursue my doctoral studies in Neoplatonism anywhere in the world, I followed an old teacher’s advice and contacted the author of the book on the subject that I most admired: Porphyre et Victorinus. I first met Pierre Hadot at a conference at Loches, France, in the summer of 1987, where he gave a memorable lecture on “The Sage and the World.”¹ He was kind enough to read and comment on the M.A. thesis I had written on Porphyry, and while I could not officially enroll under his direction for my PhD, since the Collège de France was not a degree-granting institution, I did enroll under his successor at the École pratique des hautes études, Philippe Hoffmann. After attending his lectures at the Collège for a couple of years, I persuaded him to allow me to translate some of his works into English, and this marked the beginning of a close friendship between Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadot and my wife Isabel and myself. As I continued my studies, he continued help to me out with advice, books, and articles, and when times got rough, with a few hundred francs from his own pocket as well.

What I remember most about Pierre Hadot was his simplicity. Although he had reached the highest echelons of the hierarchical French academic scheme, he never let it go to his head: in his lectures he spoke clearly, without excess rhetorical flourish, and if he wrote on the blackboard he did so with complete grace and relaxation, and often with that self-deprecating laugh that was so characteristic of him. On one occasion, he invited Isabel and me to lunch, along with half a dozen others; we were to meet at his office at the Collège de France. We all showed up, and Hadot began to lead the whole bunch of us off to the restaurant. In the hallway, however, he came across a lost-looking young couple, obviously foreigners, and asked them if he could help them. They were looking for the cafeteria, they told him timidly, and Pierre Hadot, instead of merely giving them directions, insisted on accompanying this unknown couple all the way to the cafeteria, leaving his “invited” guests to twiddle their thumbs. Each individual, known or unknown, deserved respect and courtesy in the view of Pierre Hadot. Yet he also spent a good deal of his life as an administrator, particularly at the EPHE, where he showed himself to be a tough and uncompromising negotiator, especially when questions of principle were at stake.

Over the years, my wife and I enjoyed the Hadots’ hospitality on many occasions, often at their home in Limours, a suburb some twenty miles south of Paris, where he was very proud of his well-kept garden and loved to go for walks in the neighboring woods. When he was in Paris, we would often go for dinner to a Vietnamese restaurant on the Rue des Ecoles, no longer extant, to which Michel Foucault had introduced him. He always encouraged us to have the deep-fried banana for dessert, mainly because although he loved the dish, his delicate health and vigilant wife would not allow him to order it for himself, but he could always sneak a bite from someone else’s plate. In every circumstance, he was the same: simple, unpretentious, with a mischievous gleam in his eye. Seldom has a man worn his erudition more lightly. Seldom, as well, has a man practiced so well what he preached. Although he won numerous awards and distinctions,² he never discussed them in any tone other than that of self-deprecating humor. He liked to tell of how Jacqueline de Romilly once telephoned him to let him know he had been nominated for the prestigious Grand Prix de Philosophie by the Académie Française: “We didn’t have anybody this year,” she allegedly told him, “and so we thought of you.” He also had great fun with the fact that two volumes of his articles were published by Les Belles Lettres in a collection entitled “l’âne d’or”—“The Golden Ass.”³ He claimed, with a characteristic twinkle in his eye, that he had posed for the fine portrait of the golden donkey that graced the cover of these books.

As a young philosophy student, I had often been disillusioned by finding that my philosophical heroes had feet of clay: although they wrote fine-sounding phrases in their books, they were often vain, disdainful, or otherwise unpleasant when one met them in person. Not so Pierre Hadot: like Plotinus, he was always available to himself, but above all to others. For his 80th birthday, Hadot reserved a restaurant near Limours for over a hundred guests, who were distributed at tables in groups of six to eight. As the meal progressed, Hadot made sure to come and sit for a while at each table, laughing and joking with everyone, making each guest feel as though he or she were truly special to him. Waiters and hostesses received, unfailingly, the same friendly, non-condescending treatment.

I last saw Pierre Hadot on April 12th of this year, when, despite his weakness, he came from Limours to Paris to attend a celebration devoted to him at the library of the École Normale Supérieure. At age 88, he was extremely fragile, and his eyesight and hearing were failing rapidly. Yet he held out for two hours, answering questions from the audience—something he always disliked, convinced that he was not sufficiently eloquent in unrehearsed repartee—and seeming to regain strength as the evening progressed. At the end, he thanked the organizers and participants, emphasizing that what was important was that the event had been organized and carried out in an atmosphere of friendship and mutual respect. Soon afterwards, he entered the hospital at Orsay and was diagnosed with pneumonia. He died less than two weeks after his appearance at the ENS, accompanied, as he had been for 45 years, by his beloved Ilsetraut.

Needless to say, it is too soon to give a definitive evaluation of Hadot’s thought, and only the future will verify, or fail to verify, Roger-Pol Droit’s judgment on him: “ discrete, almost self-effacing, this singular thinker might well be, in a sense, one of the influential men of our epoch.”⁴ What is certain is that he has trained a generation of students and scholars who continue his work, and that his writings, translated into many languages, continued to inspire readers from throughout the world, many of whom wrote him to say, in a variety of formulations: “You have changed my life.” Pierre Hadot was a man almost destitute of personal vanity, but if there was one thing he was proud of, it was not the multiple honors he received throughout his career, but the effect he had on the average reader.

Michael Chase



CNRS UPR 76 / Centre Jean Pépin



Paris-Villejuif



France

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¹ “La figure du Sage dans l’Antiquité Gréco-latine,” in G. Gadoffre, ed., Les Sagesses du Monde, Paris 1991, p. 9-26.

² 1969 : Prix Saintour décerné par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres; 1969: Prix Desrousseaux décerné par l’Association pour l’encouragement des Études Grecques; 1972: Corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur of Mainz; 1979: Silver medal, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; 1985: Docteur honoris causa de l’Université de Neuchâtel; 1990: Prix Dagnan-Bouveret de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques; 1992: Prix d’Académie (Fondation Le Métais-Larivière Fils), Académie Française; 1999: Grand Prix de Philosophie de l’Académie Française; 2000: Corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften at Munich; 2002: Docteur honoris causa de l’Université de Laval (Québec).

³ Études de philosophie ancienne, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998. (L’âne d’or; 8); Plotin. Porphyre. Études néoplatoniciennes, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999. (L’âne d’or ; 10). These works contain some of Hadot’s more technical works on the history of Greek and Latin philosophy, but also some of his early studies on the philosophy of nature. There is material for many more such volumes, among the 100 or so articles Hadot penned throughout his career.

4 “Pierre Hadot, 86 ans de sagesse,” Le Point. Débats, 17/04/2008, downloaded at http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-chroniques/2008-04-18/pierre-hadot-86-ans-de-sagesse/989/0/238823.

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It was with sadness that we learned of the passing of Pierre Hadot, one of France’s most extraordinary intellectual figures and a many-time HUP author. There have been obituaries in the popular press, but in the service of furthering this memory and elaborating our understanding, we asked Hadot’s one-time student and long-time collaborator Michael Chase, currently of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, to provide us with a more in-depth look at Hadot’s remarkable intellectual trajectory. Below please find Part I, in which Chase details that trajectory, from Hadot’s early interest in philology and mysticism to his later engagement with Marcus Aurelius and the idea of "spiritual exercise." Tomorrow we’ll publish Part II, in which Chase shares his memories of a man who practiced what he preached, a man who "like Plotinus … was always available to himself, but above all to others."

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Pierre Hadot – Part I

By Michael Chase

Pierre Hadot, emeritus Professor at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, died on the night of April 24-25 at the age of 88.

Born in Paris in 1922, Hadot was raised at Reims, where he received a strict Catholic education, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1944. But he soon became disenchanted with the Church, particularly after the conservative encyclical Humani Generis of August 12, 1950, and he left it in 1952 (Eros also played a role in this decision: Hadot married his first wife in 1953).

As a Researcher at the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research), Hadot was now free to devote himself to scholarship. He began with Latin Patristics, editing Ambrose of Milan and Marius Victorinus. This was the period, from the late 1950s to the 1960s, when, under the guidance of such experts as the Jesuit Paul Henry, he learned the strict discipline of philology, or the critical study and editing of ancient manuscripts, an approach that was to continue to exert a formative influence on his thought for the rest of his life. Also during this period, Hadot’s deep interest in mysticism led him to study Plotinus, and, surprisingly enough, Wittgenstein, whose comments on “das Mystische” (Tractatus 6.522) led Hadot to study the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations and publish articles on them, thus becoming one of the first people in France to draw attention to Wittgenstein.¹ Hadot wrote Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision² in a month-long burst of inspiration in 1963, a lucid, sincere work that is still one of the best introductions to Plotinus. Hadot would continue to translate and comment upon Plotinus throughout the rest of his life, founding in particular the series Les Ecrits de Plotin³, a series, still in progress, that provides translations with extensive introductions and commentaries to all the treatises of Plotinus’ Enneads, in chronological order. On a personal level, however, Hadot gradually became detached from Plotinus’ thought, feeling that Plotinian mysticism was too otherworldly and contemptuous of the body to be adequate for today’s needs. As he tells the story, when he emerged from the month-long seclusion he had imposed upon himself to write Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision, he went to the corner bakery, and “seeing the ordinary folks all around me in the bakery, I […] had the impression of having lived a month in another world, completely foreign to our world, and worse than this—totally unreal and even unlivable.”⁴

Elected Director of Studies at the 5th Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1964, Hadot married his second wife, the historian of philosophy Ilsetraut Marten in 1966. This marked another turning point in his intellectual development, for it was at least in part thanks to his wife’s interest in spiritual guidance in Antiquity that the focus of Hadot’s interests would gradually shift, over the following decade or so, from the complex and technical metaphysics of Porphyry and Marius Victorinus to a concern for the practical, ethical side of philosophy, and more precisely the development of his key concept of philosophy as a way of life.

At Hadot’s request, the title of his Chair at the EPHE Ve was soon changed from “Latin Patristics” to “Theologies and Mysticisms of Hellenistic Greece and the End of Antiquity.” In 1968, he published his thesis for the State Doctorate, the massive Porphyre et Victorinus⁵, in which he attributed a previously anonymous commentary on Plato’s Parmenides to Porphyry, the Neoplatonist student of Plotinus. This monument of erudition arguably remains, even today, the most complete exposition of Neoplatonist metaphysics.

It was around this time that Pierre Hadot began to study and lecture on Marcus Aurelius—studies that would culminate in his edition of the Meditations⁶, left unfinished at his death, and especially in his book The Inner Citadel.⁷ Under the influence of his wife Ilsetraut, who had written an important work on spiritual guidance in Seneca, Hadot now began to accord more and more importance to the idea of spiritual exercises, that is, philosophical practices intended to transform the practitioner’s way of looking at the world, and consequently his or her way of being. Following Paul Rabbow, Hadot held that the famous Exercitia Spiritualia of Ignatius of Loyola, far from being exclusively Christian, were the direct heirs of pagan Greco-Roman practices. These exercises, involving not just the intellect or reason, but all a human being’s faculties, including emotion and imagination, had the same goal as all ancient philosophy: reducing human suffering and increasing happiness, by teaching people to detach themselves from their particular, egocentric, individualistic viewpoint and become aware of their belonging, as integral component parts, to the Whole constituted by the entire cosmos. In its fully developed form, exemplified in such late Stoics as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, this change from our particularistic perspective to the universal perspective of reason had three main aspects. First, by means of the discipline of thought, we are to strive for objectivity; since, as the Stoics believe, what causes human suffering is not so much things in the world, but our beliefs about those things, we are to try to perceive the world as it is in itself, without the subjective coloring we automatically tend to ascribe to everything we experience ("That’s lovely," "that’s horrible," "that’s ugly," "that’s terrifying," etc., etc.). Second, in the discipline of desire, we are to attune our individual desires with the way the universe works, not merely accepting that things happen as they do, but actively willing for things to happen precisely the way they do happen. This attitude is, of course, the ancestor of Nietzsche’s “Yes” granted to the cosmos, a “yes” which immediately justifies the world’s existence.⁸ Finally, in the discipline of action, we are to try to ensure that all our actions are directed not just to our own immediate, short-term advantage, but to the interests of the human community as a whole.

Hadot finally came to believe that these spiritual attitudes—“spiritual” precisely because they are not merely intellectual, but involve the entire human organism, but one might with equal justification call them “existential” attitudes—and the practices or exercises that nourished, fortified and developed them, were the key to understanding all of ancient philosophy. In a sense, the grandiose physical, metaphysical, and epistemological structures that separated the major philosophical schools of Antiquity—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism⁹—were mere superstructures, intended to justify the basic philosophical attitude. Hadot deduced this, among other considerations, from the fact that many of the spiritual exercises of the various schools were highly similar, despite all their ideological differences: thus, both Stoics and Epicureans recommended the exercise of living in the present.

Hadot first published the results of this new research in an article that appeared in the Annuaire de la Ve section in 1977: “Exercices spirituels .” This article formed the kernel of his book Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique¹⁰, and was no doubt the work of Hadot’s that most impressed Michel Foucault, to the extent that he invited Hadot to propose his candidacy for a Chair at the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic position in France. Hadot did so, and was elected in 1982. Hadot’s view on philosophy as a way of life consisting of the practice of spiritual exercises was given a more complete narrative form in his Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?.¹¹

Another aspect of his thought was more controversial: if philosophy was, throughout Antiquity, conceived as a way of life, in which it was not only those who published learned tomes that were considered philosophers, but also, and in some cases especially—one thinks of Socrates, who wrote nothing—those who lived in a philosophical way, then how and why did this situation cease? Hadot’s answer was twofold: on the one hand, Christianity, which had begun by adopting and integrating pagan spiritual exercises, ended up by relegating philosophy to the status of mere handmaid of theology. On the other, at around the same historical period of the Middle Ages, and not coincidentally, the phenomenon of the European University arose. Destined from the outset to be a kind of factory in which professional philosophers trained students to become professional philosophers in their turn, these new institutions led to a progressive confusion of two aspects that were, according to Hadot, carefully distinguished in Antiquity: doing philosophy and producing discourse about philosophy. Many modern thinkers, Hadot believed, have successfully resisted this confusion, but they were mostly (and this again is no coincidence) such extra-University thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. For the most part, and with notable exceptions (one thinks of Bergson), University philosophy has concentrated almost exclusively on discourse about philosophy. Indeed, one might add, extending Hadot’s analysis, that the contemporary university, whether in its “analytic” manifestation as the analysis of language and the manipulation of quasi-mathematical symbols, or its “continental” guise as rhetorical display, irony, plays on words and learned allusions, seem to share one basic characteristic: they are quite incomprehensible, and therefore unimportant to the man or woman on the street. Hadot’s work, written in a plain, clear style that lacks the rhetorical flourishes of a Derrida or a Foucault, represents a call for a radical democratization of philosophy. It talks about subjects that matter to people today from all walks of life, which is why it has appealed, arguably, less to professional philosophers than to ordinary working people, and to professionals working in disciplines other than philosophy.¹²

Pierre Hadot taught at the Collège until his retirement in 1992. In addition to Plotinus and Marcus, his teaching was increasingly devoted to the philosophy of nature, an interest he had picked up from Bergson, and which he had first set forth in a lecture at the Jungian-inspired Eranos meetings at Ascona, Switzerland, in 1967.¹³ Combined with his long-term love of Goethe¹⁴, this research on the history of mankind’s relation to nature would finally culminate in Le Voile d’Isis, a study of the origin and interpretations of Heraclitus’ saying “Nature loves to hide,” published a mere 6 years before his death.¹⁵ Here and in the preliminary studies leading up this work, Hadot distinguishes two main currents in the history of man’s attitude to nature: the “Promethean” approach, in which man tries to force nature to reveal her secrets in order better to exploit her, and the “Orphic” attitude, a philosophical or aesthetic approach in which one listens attentively to nature, recognizing the potential dangers of revealing all her Secrets.

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¹ These articles have been recently reedited: see Wittgenstein et les limites du langage, Paris: Vrin, 2004. (Bibliothèque d’histoire de la philosophie).

² Plotin ou La simplicité du regard, Paris 1963; 4e éd. Gallimard, 1997 (Folio essais; 302). English version: Plotinus or The simplicity of vision, transl. by Michael Chase; with an introd. by Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Pr., 1993.

³ Les écrits de Plotin publiés dans l’ordre chronologique, sous la dir. de P. Hadot, Paris: Éd. du Cerf (Coll. Textes). More than a dozen volumes have appeared in the series, two of them (Traité 38 (VI,7), 1988; Traité 50 (III,5), 1990) by Hadot himself.

⁴ Hadot, La philosophie comme manière de vivre. Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et Arnold I. Davidson, Paris: Albin Michel (Itinéraires du savoir), 2001, p. 137. I quote from the revised second edition I am currently preparing of The Present Alone is Our Happiness, Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Marc Djaballah, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 (Cultural Memory in the Present).

⁵ Porphyre et Victorinus, 2 vols., Paris : Études Augustiniennes, 1968. See also Hadot’s “Complementary thesis”: Marius Victorinus, Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1971.

⁶ Marc Aurèle, Écrits pour lui-même. Tome 1, Introduction générale. Livre I ; éd. et tr. Pierre Hadot, avec la collab. de Concetta Luna. Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1998. (Collection des Universités de France).

⁷ La Citadelle intérieure. Introduction aux Pensées de Marc Aurèle, Paris: Fayard, 1992. English: The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated by Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 1998.

⁸ Nietzsche, Posthumous Fragments, end 1866-Spring 1887, 7, [38], cited in Hadot, La philosophie comme manière de vivre, p. 277.

⁹ I leave out Cynicism and Scepticism, partly because it is debatable whether they were actually “schools” as opposed to philosophical tendencies, and partly because, unlike the other schools, they refrained from metaphysical speculation.

¹⁰ Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1981, several reprints. English: Philosophy as a Way of Life. Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited with an Introduction by Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Michael Chase, Oxford/Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1995.

¹¹ Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?, Paris: Gallimard, 1995. English: What is Ancient Philosophy?, translated by Michael Chase, Cambridge, Mass.-London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.

¹² As of 2006, Hadot’s works had been cited by researchers working in management studies, economics, the study of Chinese thought, education, sociology, political science, and women’s studies, to name but a few.

¹³ “L’apport du néoplatonisme à la philosophie de la nature en Occident”, in Tradition und Gegenwart, Eranos-Jahrbuch 37 (1968), 91-132.

¹⁴ See now N’oublie pas de vivre. Goethe et la tradition des exercices spirituels, Paris: Albin Michel (Bibliothèque Idées), 2008.

15 Le Voile d’Isis. Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de Nature, Paris: Gallimard, 2004. English: The veil of Isis. An essay on the history of the idea of nature, translated by Michael Chase, Cambridge, Mass.-London, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

Exciting news – we’re ready to announce the establishment, via an extraordinary gift from the Murty family of Bangalore, of a new series dedicated to making the literary heritage of India available to English-language readers. The series is called the Murty Classical Library of India — first volumes to be be published in 2013. The text of the press release follows.

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HARVARD ANNOUNCES NEW MURTY CLASSICAL LIBRARY OF INDIA SERIES

Cambridge, MA — Harvard University and Harvard University Press (HUP) announced today that the Murty family of Bangalore, India, has established a new publication series, the Murty Classical Library of India, with a generous gift of $5.2 million. The dual-language series aims both to serve the needs of the general reading public and to enhance scholarship in the field.

Harvard Provost Steven E. Hyman noted that the Murty family gift would enable HUP to present the literary cultures of India to a global readership in an unprecedented manner. “The Murty Classical Library of India will make the classical heritage of India accessible worldwide for generations to come,” said Hyman. “We are truly grateful to the Murty family for their vision and leadership in making this historic initiative a reality.”

The Murty family’s endowed series aims to bring the classical literature of India, much of which remains locked in its original language, to a global audience, making many works available for the first time in English and showcasing the contributions of Indian literature to world civilization. Narayana Murty said of the new series, “I am happy that Harvard University Press is anchoring this publishing project.” His wife, Sudha, agreed. “We are happy to participate in this exciting project of bringing the rich literary heritage of India to far corners of the world.”

Under the direction of General Editor Sheldon Pollock, William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University, and aided by an international editorial board composed of distinguished scholars, translators will provide contemporary English versions of works originally composed in Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and other Indian languages.

Each volume will present the English translation with the original text in the appropriate Indic script on the facing page. The books will be supplemented by scholarly introductions, expert commentary, and textual notes, all with the goal of establishing Murty Classical Library volumes as the most authoritative editions available.

The Murty family’s vision has already begun to impress notable scholars, such as Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, Amartya Sen, who expressed his appreciation for the initiative. “There are few intellectual gaps in the world that are as glaring as the abysmal ignorance of Indian classics in the Western world. It is wonderful that the Murty Classical Library of India is taking up the challenge of filling this gap, through a new commitment of the Harvard University Press, backed by the discerning enthusiasm of the Murty family, and the excellent leadership of Sheldon Pollock—an outstanding Sanskritist and classical scholar. This will be a big contribution to advancing global understanding that is so much needed in the world today.”

HUP plans to make the works available in both print and digital formats. The first volumes are scheduled for publication in fall 2013. An Indian edition is being planned.

Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press is a major publisher of nonfiction, scholarly, and general interest books with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York, and London.

Great news today – HUP has a brand new website! It’s the result of many months of hard work on the part of our colleagues, so we congratulate them. In addition to the appealing design sense, new features include improved browsing and search capability, simpler ordering, and a new ease in discovering the many treasures of our backlist.

Here’s what the front page looks like:

But the best way to get a taste is to browse yourself – just click here or point your browser to http://www.hup.harvard.edu.

In American and Western European popular memory, the 1970s—sandwiched between the ferment of the 1960s and the shifting political structure of the 1980s, characterized by Cold War rivalries and by economic and social crises—were a decade spent in the doldrums.

But, a new book argues, to adopt this limited view is to overlook key international changes that took place during the 1970s.

You can learn more about this international reconsideration of traditional postwar history on Wednesday afternoon, when Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs will host a special event focusing on The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective. The book’s editors, Erez Manela, Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, and Daniel Sargent, will take part in a discussion moderated by Lizabeth Cohen.

The compelling and original essays in The Shock of the Global take up topics ranging from China’s economic transformation to changes in international finance to the eradication of smallpox to the social implications of rock music. Together, these pieces present an unprecedentedly international account of the 1970s.

Soviet-American détente, it emerges in this new account, was not the most profound or enduring change of the decade. Instead, international developments over the course of the 1970s gave rise to a host of large-scale economic, political, and societal changes— the growth of transnational financial markets and trade, the rise of human rights, the growing international influence of NGOs and protest movements— that in turn created the new, more globalized world that we inhabit today.

Event details

Date: March 31, 2010

Time: 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Location: CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St., Tsai Auditorium (Room S010)

Via the Humanities Center at Harvard: A memorial event to celebrate the life of Barbara Johnson, the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society and author of books including Defigurations du langage poetique, The Critical Difference, A World of Difference, The Wake of Deconstruction, The Feminist Difference, Mother Tongues, and Persons and Things, will be held at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, March 26, in the auditorium of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge.

A reception
will follow at 5:00 p.m. in the Thompson Room of the Barker Center.
Limited parking will be available in the Broadway Garage from 2-7 p.m. on
the day of the event. 

More on the impact of Professor Johnson’s extraordinary work is here.

Perhaps you would like a little culture with your corned beef and cabbage today?

 

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day comes Wes Davis’ An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, the most comprehensive work of its kind, collecting nearly 800 poems from more than 50 of the most intriguing and important Irish poets writing since World War II.

 

The anthology, arranged in order of poets’ birth, surveys a broad range of poets from the Republic of Ireland and the North, including writers known primarily for work in other fields–Samuel Beckett and Aidan Carl Mathews, being two–as well as poets who write primarily in Gaelic, like Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and have gained attention in the United States through translation by the likes of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon; and still others whose work has not been widely available in English translation, such as Seán Ó Ríordáin and Cathal Ó Searcaigh.

 

Davis fills nearly 1,000 pages with poems you may already know and others you could learn today, and offers headnotes for each poet, providing historical overview, informative short essays and helpful notes.

 

So today, keep an eye out for leprechauns, try green beer, and enjoy the best of Patrick Kavanagh.

 

Listen to an interview with Davis here.

HUP author Khalil Gibran Muhammad speaks to a standing-room-only crowd at Harlem’s Hue-Man Bookstore on Saturday, March 6th. Muhammad’s book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America explores "the racial data revolution"of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how early social scientists linked the idea of blackness to criminality in the urban North, creating the paradoxical truism that "whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals."

||| Listen to the author on WBAI’s "Talkback!" with Hugh Hamilton.

Great news — UGA historian Bethany Moreton has won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for her HUP book To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (reviews: Bookforum, NYTBR, The Big Money). The award is given each year by the Organization of American Historians for the best first book on a significant phase of American history. In investigating the complex network that gave rise to the giant we know as Wal-Mart — on that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical
employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and
free-market activists — Moreton’s book uncovers the roots of the "Christian service" ethos that has increasingly powered capitalism at home and abroad. Moreton will accept the award at the 2010 OAH meeting in Washington DC on April 10.

||| Read Bethany Moreton’s essay "Culture War on Aisle 5? Wal-Mart, Evangelicals, and ‘Extreme Capitalism’" at Powells.com.

A fantastic interview with Khalil Gibran Muhammad on his book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, in which he seeks to expose the “glue that binds crime to race”—the logic by which we in
America are able to convince ourselves that “whites commit crimes, but
black males are criminals":

Khalil Gibran Muhammad – WBAI "Talkback!" March 3, 2010

The interview aired on WBAI New York’s "Talkback!" program with host Hugh Hamilton. You can hear Professor Muhammad discuss his book in person *this Saturday* at 2pm at Harlem’s Hue-Man Bookstore (directions here).

Out this month:

From the world’s foremost expert on the geopolitics of the opium trade comes a book that provides the clearest and most up-to-date explanation of why illicit opium production emerges in certain regions and, crucially, why decades of aggressive anti-drug efforts on the part of the United States and United Nations have resulted in a total failure to suppress or even reduce the illicit growing of poppies. In Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy offers a precise history of the opium trade, following it from China to Southeast Asia, through the Burmese “Golden Triangle” and on to Afghanistan, which currently produces an astounding 93% of the world’s opium, with no signs of slowing. Along the way, he exposes the futility of a “war on drugs” by showing that there is a symbiotic relationship between war economies and drug economies—why a trade that thrives on the poverty and underdevelopment created by violent conflict can never be defeated militarily. In this sense, drug war logic is, he argues, almost exactly backwards.

Chouvy’s book, the result of years of careful research on the ground in opium-producing regions, should be read by anyone with an interest in finding out the real causes of the thriving trade in illicit opium. This includes policymakers, journalists, and the ordinary citizen who prefers a rational approach to drug policy, one that focuses on the root causes of poppy cultivation and the motivations of impoverished farmers who often find themselves victims twice-over—“forced by acute poverty to resort to illicit agricultural drug production,” Chouvy says, they “find they must then endure the violence induced by the War on Drugs.” Bolstered with detailed maps of trafficking routes, created by the author himself, and a postscript that addresses clear-headedly the most recent developments in Afghanistan, Opium is the most serious treatment to date of the complex politics behind the opium trade, one that must be taken into account if the United States, during its present entanglement in the world’s foremost opium-producing region, wishes to avoid the destructive mistakes of the past.

Check out Chouvy’s detailed website for articles, maps, photos and more on the global opium trade.