Abraham Rotstein, Weekend Notes IV

Weekend Notes (Overview)

Text in English to type

G[eorge] B[ernard] Shaw

[2] Labor had a deep resentment against Shaw. They claimed he was a traitor to democracy. The upper classes claimed that Shaw probably did more to prepare the plebian government of England than any person.

No one has raised the question of what makes Shaw a success on the stage although his characters are only masks and have no serious conviction or life. There is no reason to raise the question of his being a poet or a great mind.

Priestley (who is really a serious obstacle to anything serious anywhere) wrote an article on this subject in the New Statesman. It was a new angle on Major Barbara with everything put on the significance of her being a religious person and this being a religious piece.

Tu sum up Shaw is to transcend him, and the English can't. He was the most advanced thinker in is time on political theory. He reunited two basic ideas: 1) The life force idea taken from Nietzsche, ie the basic irrational element in reality – life against the mind. 2) The mind of the scholastics and Thomas Aquinas. The essence of human society was rooted in the character of which mind is made.

[3] Society is based on the unchangeable character of mind and the problems of life are answered through the structure of society, because they reflect the structure of mind. E.g. give the devil his due and let him loose and he will rebuild the world as it was. (Also the critic).

While in the Superman life is glorified, another man is needed. This is the extreme embodiment of Nietzschean irrationalism.

Shaw is the only thinker who bothered to analyse human institutions to their basic rational nature.

Every major thinker has two opposite ideas e.g. Marx, Hegel, Rousseau, and also Jesus and Paul state opposites in an indissoluble unity of temperament. That's why innumerable interpretations are possible on one line or the other: life and logos. There are always some who embody the life force. There is the creation of a baby, but the imagination is also conceptual. Conception is both biological and logical - body and mind.

At the same time he argues for marriage and claims that for society there is no danger of anarchism etc. e.g. Pygmalion. There is no use trying to evade the inherent necessities of a mind structure which human society actually is (through being heterodox, funny, etc.)

The whole mystery of saints is that there are saints e.g. Joan is an obvious situation discovers the obvious - the French nation. But the Roman church can't have nations and so she's burned. She was [4] supposed to work miracles but didn't. She was beginning to do what every Frenchman had to do. We describe these as miracles by pretending not to understand.

In Androcles and the Lion, Androcles is just a martyr and saint and the king can't withstand that. What he really touches on here is the greatest force of human existence – here, the saint.

Julius Caesar was caring not about himself but this duty.

In Shaw, the two most important possibilities reached their limit: 1) irrationality and the life force (people, races, etc.) 2) Equality, decency and progress.

This teaches you to rebuild human society under its rational content vs. its limitations. Then he criticizes democracy from this angle. The rational (logos) runs along mind principles. Concept is expressed as value. Then everything follows(?). Shaw doesn't accept utilitarian values as transcending.

Shaw's theorem is that there is no solution to life except the Superman as a biological entity. The play shows up the illusions of liberalism, which accepts neither the laws of the mind nor the facts of life. His criticism is of a world that doesn't accept the commitment of love and the life force, nor spirituality and logic, but cheaply evades both by conventional morality impossible. That is his criticism of ideologies, refuting their main position as not having a basis [5] (Mrs. Warren's Profession, Captain Brassbound's Conversion). They are not up to the basic facts on which people get their existence and act in everyday life.

What is not understood is the basic conservatism of accepting the reality of society as equal to the mind reality. The belief in freedom, equality and justice patly support and contradict each other.

But you can only say that of real things. Therefore you cannot disregard the spiritual source of your own life without destroying yourself.

The English critics never said what was the source of Shaw's effectiveness. He could write incredibly good plays with the greatest of ease.

Man exists on three levels:

• The body. If you kick or pinch it hurts.
• Psychological mechanism. You may hit him in his vanity in a psychological or emotional sense
• Life is nourished from internal sources of faith and conscience which he can't contradict without destroying himself.

The secret of Shaw as a dramatist is that he never makes a move without a bullseye on one of these three sources. Shaw says that man exists on all three levels and this is true of all humans always. This is terribly original for we put either one or the other [6] higher e.g. either the serious or buffoonery or the psychological character.

P. once wrote on Shaw, just about fifty years ago in 1906, ”The Drama of the Economic Interpretation of History”. He read all that Shaw had then written. P. just thought that it was the kind of play where ideologies are victims, exploding in the shifting realities - passive dramas where the heroes didn't act but are seted upon by cricumstances. Then he was only 20, and ever since Shaw was one of P.'s favorites.

Shaw is a great poet and has a world of his own in which creating goes on, but he operates with the transubstantiation of men.

All men always and all the time are equally themselves on all three levels: 1) There is no man you cannot hurt by pinching his car, punching etc. 2) Character and psychology are expressed in human weaknesses like vanity. 3) The same man, however he may be is a spiritual being.

The secret of the plays is that Shaw never ceases to be 100% effective on one these levels moving up and down the scale all the time. No one ever conceived of a scale(?) related to the interpretation of man's life in society with logos and bios.

There is the reality of the mind. The mind is real and you cannot act against its law. The characters are appearing to act against [7] the reality of society, e.g. the skeptic, the anarchist, but Shaw doesn't give it this way.

Eros, sex, hunger, struggle for survival and imagination are of the same nature. (Heartbreak House, where the old genius, the skipper is head of an upper class family).

The process of creativity is literally the same in a poet conceiving a play and a woman conceiving a child. There is no difference. (Back to Methuselah, if man lived long long enough there is conceiving in the imaginative sense). A poem is not a mind product but a life product, therefore conceiving is the same.

Law, ethics, esthetics, maths, is mind. The mind is restricted to the logically compelling. Will is a life product, not a mind product. (Back to Nietzsche and the will of power).

The whole thing must be rethought in the “Essence of Fascism”, and Klages. P. got it from Shaw and would never have got it without him. In the “Essence of Fascism” there is the pagan life force and categorical thinking which eliminates the individual (Spann). the individual disappears and the corporations takes his place.

These are not delusions of cheap sentimentality. It is partly the life force and love and also rationality. Equality, justice etc. are moral principles which come from the very essence of mind. Shaw insists on equality and freedom which are postulates of political theory.

[8] […] ↑

The Great Transformation and America

↑

Technology and Utopia

[23] P[olanyi] doesn’t take Owen as Utopian. He was full of realism but in one of his sentences he said that there are limitations and these would have to be accepted. ↑

Rationality

[35] What are ends of the rationality movement? (my question)

The nearest to a philosophy of rationalism ever built was the Enlightenment. It was only a counterphilosophy to a theologically interpreted world.

The Encyclopedists via the Enlightenment represented rationalism. They claimed that the universe and existence can be understood and is in harmony with reason. It probably means the unaided mind does not seek support in revelation.

It may organize itself as humanism - man is the ultimate explanation and value. This got terrific secret…

↑

The Revelations

[37] (From P.'s discussion of the dangers of science, my comment of Eve's apple to Adam).

P. is not really thinking of the symbolic expression of reminiscences. Man awakened out of his vegetative soul to the consciousness of death which created what we call man. The knowledge is here a reminiscence of man as we know him, being born and reshaping his consciousness. But to P. these revelations have always had meaning. Revelation does not come in a special or specific way or we wouldn't know it. The importance is its truth and we must know our life is limited. There is no use denying that and therefore the emphasize is its consequences.

Everybody knows he can extinguish the meaning of his life by denying his inner nature and it wouldn't be in the same sense as physical death. Revelation only means the consequences which are irreversible and that is true of the reality of society.

We can't say who told you or how do you know? That's why we speak of revelation, because once there, it's irrevocable.

That's why the Old Testament or Babylonian story meant something different, such as whether sex is a danger and contradicts man's nature by his being ashamed. P. is not keen on this side of the matter. Other people might be concerned with the structure of human consciousness and the way it is linked here.

Both sex and hunger have this awkward character about them [38] and every human society deals with them. They are a basic danger to every society. In tribal society all are hungry and there is no shame and in the Odyssey hunger is never thought of as a terrible danger. But in the Odyssey the individual who is hungry is suddenly dependent on strangers. He begins to nurse his shameful belly and begins to ask for food. This is the first time that hunger is identified in the history of man.

P. doesn't want to decide what the O.T. scene reveals.

When P. and I talk about something we know what we talk about, but to answer questions we would need lots of educations. We talk about what we mean and how it relates to things belonging to Christianity, not what Christianity means. There are many doubts and unanswerable questions here. Even Tostoy and Schweitzer differ.

Tolstoy didn't regard the interim ethic as interim. If we accept the interim it would fit with P.'s view of the reality of society because Jesus would have disregarded it.

P. only argues about things which are certain, not uncertain things, i.e. the landscape before him. Maybe it isn't Ontario or on maps but P. talks about certainty and not second-hand knowledge. P. is suspicious of anything not obvious.

The one sentence of Owen’s says that we cannot appeal to the reality of society for disregarding the Christian commitment until we try to see if the reality of society is a limitation for equality and justice. The reality of society is the third horror we are confronted [39] with – being a number of society and not doing anything about it.

Three times shivers were sent into man - three horrors and three pieces of advices:
1) Live as well as you can. This consists of doing works. "Allons labourer notre jardin" (Voltaire). There is no metaphysics. The garden serves the day.
2) Let us forget about ourselves − Jesus. This is excellent advice, for anybody who can, feels safe. Jesus also said don't accept the temptations: miracle, power and magic (the three temptations in the desert, bread from a stone, a jump from the roof of the temple. It offered power over all the realms of the world.)

P. thinks Jesus is justified in thinking he might have been Roman Emperor − the speech he wrote for Pilate and never delivered (P. saw it in bas-relief in the Roman catacombe).

This page contains question(s)
that we should discuss
in the Talk Page!

3) Our answer is to accept the reality of society and make our society as just, equal and free as possible. There must be power and compulsion. That is P.'s answer.

It is not a glorification of the totality of society but a commitment to the first and second revelations - to live and work in spite of society. P. really believes this but believes that the place of the economy in society should be changed.

[40] The reality of society is that limitation of some abstract free will which remains after you have abstracted from any kind of limitation of your free will in society in which you can abstract at all. After you abstract from every conceivable limitation you are limited.

You cannot […]

The reality of society consists in the conformity, and this is an expression of the reality of society. You can conform or not, but you can't contract out.

Rouseau said you could contract out − you go away. […] ↑

Freedom

↑

Archaeology

↑

Christianity and the Social Revolution

↑

Modern Politics (2)

↑

Marx

↑

World Trade

↑

Joan Robinson - The Accumulation of Capital

↑

Anthropology Fieldbook

↑

The Mind

[59] The mind works as dialectic, and psychological phenomena act that way. Hegel was the only thinker to use dialectic.

This has a relevance to social phenomena for they are movements of the mind. The mind is an explanation of the action, e. g. if you have a class struggle with revolution, counter-revoltuion etc. Dialectic brought in phenomena that were no historical or social. That's the peculiarity of a philosophy: you can apply it to art, nature, and then you can play with these terms in a clever way.

Take the concept of a fact: give a negation of it and you have a delusion. Then negate that and you have art – a synthesis. You can say of art it's a delusion insofar as it's not a fact and vice versa. Therefore it has elements of both fact and delusion, and denies both. There is an artistic reality.

This is probably the way mind functions, in fact, delusion and art. The relationship of art delusion is part of a comprehensive metaphysics. Art is not nature. Only in disciplines is fact verified.

Take the statement “The grass is on the hill.” If he actually dreamt it you have a dream statement and this is the content of it. How if somebody says it's a poetic statement, it has a reality of its own and it's art. Art is a higher type of reality and a higher type of delusion.

[60] The dialectic is an ordering of concepts. Facts have other opposites: the lie, semblance, (process?) are opposites of fact in different directions, and you can reverse this again. You can put order into the terms of science, but if you apply dialectic to a process………

Drama is dialectic itself – in order to get change and reverse something.

People like Marx could play about with this. Dialectical Materialism is unreal. It is not a mind phenomenon. The mind works in contradiction. Hegel's dialectic is the way the mind works in its inner laws – the concept of fact, the concept of illusion, the concept of art.

There is no reason for nature to change accordingly − no reason to assume opposites, e. g. cold and hot are not. Hegel wrote an astronomy where stars move about dialectically. This is all nonsense. Engels makes matter move according to mind.

In history, for 'material' Marx meant that the economic and technological determine the movement of the spirit. There is much more truth in this than saying it is the change of ideologies. This is true for a change in economic circumstances.

History is things happening through human beings and so is partly a mind phenomenon, i. e. it suddenly turns the opposite way. By 'material' you don't mean dead nature. But "economic" could mean "process" and "motives" and this is complex. ↑

Art (2)

↑

Remarks

Borkenau

↑

C.S. Louis

↑

Gardening

↑

Text Informations

Date: August 25/26, 1956 (Interview)
KPA: 45/05