Clichés, stock phrases, adherence  to conventional, standardized codes of expression  and conduct have the socially recognized function of  protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim  on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

On one of my expeditions to Transylvania, we took a day off from fossil hunting and took to the hills. Mattias stopped the car in front of a castle outside a small village called Săcel. It must have been grand once but now it was falling to ruin, abandoned long ago. Most of the bright green paint outside had faded, exposing the bricks, the windows were all busted, the wooden floors were decaying and the plaster was sprayed with graffiti. Feral dogs wondered about like zombies. Dust clung to every surface. But somehow, as if defying the laws of gravity and ravages of time, a gilded chandelier hung proudly from the ceiling in the foyer. We walked underneath is nervously, as we climbed the creaking stairs. Upstairs, more squalor was spread before us, an open chasm of a room with a gaping hole where the used to be a bay window. It was here, a hundred years ago when it was a library, that baron Nopcsa sat and read about dinosaurs, learning the nuances of their bones, theorizing why the fossils he found on the grounds outside were so strange. This castle was Nopcsa’s home, the seat of his family for centuries. Many generations of Nopcsas lived here, and when the baron himself was at the height of his achievement, when he was spying on the Albanians for his empire, and lecturing about dinosaurs to packed audiences all over the continent, it probably seemed that many generations would follow.

So, too, it was with the dinosaurs.

Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

• 

• 

Without exception, these women had a tremendous appetite for high culture. The music they experienced was performed live in their drawing rooms, sometimes in Sargent’s art studio — it elevated them to another realm. Wagner was all the rage among their peers, and they made pilgrimages to Bayreuth for performances of the Ring cycle. They considered theater, art, and literature essential to their very being. Isabella Stewart Gardener amassed a spectacular art collection and created her own museum. The portrait of Sally Fairchild inspired her sister to take up the brush and follow the path of an artist. These women scribbled their favorite poems into their diaries and letters, and carefully dissected the latest novels they were reading. Elizabeth Chanler wrote poetry. As a child, Elsie Palmer penned two stories, which her proud father published in a leather bound volume.

Donna M. Lucey, Sargent’s Women, Four Lives Behind the Canvass

• 

• 

We gave Heidegger the nickname “the little  magician from Messkirch.” … He was a small  dark man who knew how to cast a spell insofar as he could make disappear what he had a  moment before presented. His lecture technique  consisted in building up an edifice of ideas which he then proceeded to tear down,  presenting the spellbound listeners with a riddle and then leaving them empty-handed. This ability to cast a spell at times had very considerable consequences: it attracted more or less  pathological personality types, and, after three  years of guessing at riddles, one student took her  own life.

Karl Löwith, quoted in below.

Why oh why?

This is why:

At the time, Arendt was a far cry from the proud New York intellectual warrior she would become later in life. She was a frail eighteen-year-old from the East Prussian city of Königsberg. Though she hailed from a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish family, Hannah experienced her share of hard knocks at an early age.  Her father died a prolonged, horrible death from syphilis in 1913, his agonies extending from Arendt’s second to seventh year. Several months before her father’s death, her beloved maternal grandfather also died. A few years later, her mother remarried.  Overnight, the precocious young Hannah acquired  two half-sisters with whom she had precious little in  common. Her sense of displacement was no doubt acute. In an impassioned, youthful autobiographical tract portentously titled “The Shadows,” she  lamented her “helpless, betrayed youth.”  .

So maybe it was not entirely about spell-binding lecturing style, but also about something else: feeling loved.

The love of a virgin

Somewhere in his letters, I think, Kawabata observes that there is something unique about the love of a virgin: no one will love you that way, he says, and means that a woman feels for the older man who deflowered her — if she had been in love with him at the time — an especially profound attachment, one bordering on dependency, and one likely to last a lifetime.

(“Yasunari Kawabata first saw Hatsuyo Ito in 1919 at Café Elan in Tokyo, which catered to a literary clientele. Kawabata was 20 and thinking of studying Japanese literature in college; Hatsuyo was 13, a waitress at the café. She was energetic, beautiful and alone—she had lost her mother when she was nine years old. Kawabata, too, had grown up as an orphan.”)

I remember being struck by that comment, as it bore out my own experience, and thinking in a flash, how cunningly wise may have been the ancient custom of giving young virgins as wives to older men.

Something like this probably happened here.

Antisemitism and acceptance

Elżbieta Ettinger (in her Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger), adds:

That Hannah Arendt was drawn to [Heidegger] is not surprising. Given the powerful influence he  exerted on his students it was almost inevitable.  Neither her past—that of a fatherless, searching  youngster—nor her vulnerable, melancholic nature prepared her to withstand Heidegger’s determined effort to win her heart. She shared  the insecurity of many assimilated Jews who were  still uncertain about their place, still harboring  doubts about themselves. By choosing her as his  beloved, Heidegger fulfilled for Hannah the  dream of generations of German Jews, going  back to such pioneers of assimilation as Rahel Varnhagen.

The Betrayal

Heidegger’s position as a professor made him vulnerable if the affair were to be discovered. He soon arranged for Arendt to change schools; though they continued to meet clandestinely for some time afterwards, he put an end to the affair when he was appointed to professorship in Freiburg. Arendt may have been suicidal (she wrote him: ‘And with God’s  will / I will love you more after death’) and perhaps one has to see her quick marriage the following year in that light.

Heidegger joined NSDAP, and took to Sieg-heiling his students at the opening and closing of lectures; and hounding Jews out of academia. And Arendt escaped from Germany; their contact broke off.

Virgin’s thralldom never-ending

Arendt and Heidegger reconciled upon her return to  Germany in 1950. The reunion transformed her from one of his harshest critics into one of his most staunch defenders. At the time, Heidegger remained banned from German university life. His reputation irreparably damaged as a result of his status as a Nazi collaborator, he stood in desperate need of a reliable publicist and goodwill ambassador. Arendt fit the bill. As a Jewish intellectual with an international reputation and a leading critic of totalitarianism, her support could help parry the persistent accusations concerning Heidegger’s Nazism. Arendt was ecstatic about their reunion. She believed that she had recovered the dreams of her youth, the worse for wear, perhaps, but recovered nevertheless. “That evening and that [next] morning,” she wrote, “are a  confirmation of an entire life. In fact, a never-expected  confirmation.”

Arendt became Heidegger’s de facto American literary agent, diligently overseeing contracts and  translations of his books. She remained in his thrall till the very end. In 1974, the year before her death, she wrote to him, in barely sublimated code: “No one can deliver a lecture the way you do, nor did anyone before you.”

Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse

Heidegger sensed the shortcomings of traditional  philosophy and developed his paradigm of Existenz to offset them. The promise of his approach  continues to merit our serious attention. Yet this  scrutiny must not be allowed to devolve into  hagiography or uncritical devotion—constant  temptations when one is confronted with a thinker of  Heidegger’s singular talents. Heidegger believed his  philosophy was able to capture and convey an  experience of the “primordial” (das Ursprüngliche); as  such, it was viscerally opposed to superficialities of  modern thought. Yet he was often unable to explain  why the primordial itself was valuable, or why it was  intrinsically superior to the more contemporary  philosophical approaches he deemed misguided.  Providing “rational accounts” of his positions and  preferences was never Heidegger’s forte. Despite its merits, his approach, too, possesses distinct  limitations. Too often, it glorifies “immemorial  experiences” and “unreason.” It remains suffused  with an antidemocratic sensibility that Heidegger  himself perversely viewed as a badge of distinction.  All of these prejudices played a role in his delusional  political misstep of 1933. His supporters—on the  whole, an adulatory lot—have yet to disentangle the  intellectual threads that precipitated his Nazi  involvement. Until they do, their attempts to  perpetuate his legacy will remain afflicted by many of  the same oversights and conceptual imbalances.  Thus, like a Greek tragedy—though on a smaller  scale—the sins of the father will be visited upon the  daughters and sons. 

To translate into Standard American English: Heidegger’s thinking was sheer, unalloyed bullshit (Reines Scheisse, to coin a Germanic logical term, in keeping with Heidegger’s notion that German was so very superior at expressing thought) and his students were all condemned to making non-sensical hash of things as a result of their love for him.

This admiration, a kind of mind-spell slavery, apparently came form the charismatic manner in which he delivered his lectures. Heidegger was famous as a great thinker before he even published anything, famous as a great thinker on the strength of… his performance. In this, he was like some other great windbags we could name; and his students, all uncommonly intelligent men and women, have gone on to show that great intelligence and extensive scholarship is no defense against pure, unalloyed Unsinn.

Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse

Do not become anxious, you German republicans;  the German revolution will not take place any more  pleasantly and gently for having been preceded by the Kantian critique, Fichtean transcendental idealism, or even natural philosophy. Through these theories  revolutionary forces have built up which only await  the day on which they may break loose, filling the  world with horror and awe. Kantians will appear who  want nothing to do with mercy even in the  phenomenal world; they will plough up without pity  the very soil of our European life with sword and axe,  in order to eradicate every last root of the past….  Armed Fichteans will arise, whose fanaticism of will  can be restrained neither through fear nor through  self-interest…. More terrible than all will be the  natural philosophers, who will participate actively in any German revolution, identifying themselves with  the very work of destruction. If the hand of the  Kantian strikes swift and sure because his heart is  not moved by any traditional reverence; if the Fichtean courageously defies all danger because for  him it does not exist at all in reality; so the natural  philosopher will be terrible, for he has allied himself  to the primal forces of nature. He can conjure up the  demonic powers of ancient German pantheism and  that lust for battle that we find among the ancient  Germans will flame within him.   

HEINRICH HEINE, History of Philosophy and Religion in Germany (1834) 
Quoted in
Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse

[On Livingstone’s second mission to Africa, up the Zambezi River], commander Bedingfield RN, who later rose to be an admiral, was in charge of river transport and was a  practical man of action in the Baker mould.  Bedingfield was quite appalled to find the Zambezi  nothing like it had been described [by Livingstone] and the expedition  leader a man incapable of making sound decisions. 

Livingstone, who had a fetish about evacuating the  bowels regularly, wrote the commander a magisterial  note. 

A pretty extensive acquaintance with African Expeditions enables me to offer a hint which, if you  take it in the same frank and friendly spirit in which it is offered, you will on some future day thank me and smile at the puerilities that now afflict you.  With the change of climate there is often a peculiar condition of the bowels which makes the individual imagine all sorts of things in others.  Now I earnestly and most respectfully recommend a little aperient medicine occasionally and you will  find it much more soothing than writing official  letters. 

Brian Thompson is the nation’s leading comic historian (and the book is in places really funny). Yes, that is a thing.

Brian Thompson, Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum

Kathryn Hughes is thoroughly modern, her interests and interpretative methodology is in keeping with all modern -isms; but she is intelligent and fun and thus stands out among her colleagues: her treatments are in-depth but not pedantic, her sex spicy but not prurient. Her description of the scandal of a suspected pregnancy among young queen Victoria’s court ladies, brings to mind a Sebastiano Ricci miniature (above); the discussion of the beard of Darwin serves as an occasion for a delightful discussion of late Victorian fashion for facial hair (and whether women find it sexy); George Eliot’s enlarged hand (a recently discovered glove suggests is wasn’t) — for a discussion of the sexual mores of Victorian milkmaids. But surely best of all is the perfectly reasoned proof that Fanny Cornforth (below) must have been a consummate gamahucheur.

Kathryn Hughes, Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum

The Malāmatiyya (ملامتية) or Malamatis were a Muslim mystic group active in 9th century Greater Khorasan. Their root word of their name is the Arabic word malāmah (ملامة) “blame”. The Malamatiyya believed in the value of self-blame, that piety should be a private matter and that being held in good esteem would lead to worldly attachment. They concealed their knowledge and made sure their faults would be known, reminding them of their imperfection. The Malamati is one for whom the doctrine of “spiritual states” is fraught with subtle deceptions of the most despicable kind; he despises personal piety, not because he is focused on the perceptions or reactions of people, but as a consistent involuntary witness of his own “pious hypocrisy”.

All of the Malamati values and practices attempt to humiliate the nafs with every action so that they may work toward a spiritual transformation. The “path of blame” requires that an individual always claims blame and hold his or herself in contempt. In this way, their inner being is directed towards a connection with God, however the interior is kept secret by an exterior that is non-conformist or unruly. “They live on two planes, a double life”

Malamatiyyas practice intentional poverty. This poverty is sometimes a result of one of their related beliefs, that one must strive to only have a despised profession and avoid a prodigious profession. However, poverty and asceticism alone is not sufficient to impede the nafs and develop the spiritual sirr. If one openly advertises their poverty, the nafs will still thrive on the admiration and respect that asceticism will draw from others. Then, the result of asceticism would be to bolster self-appraisal instead of rid the self of ego.

Consequently, the Malamatiyyas believe that the only way to rid oneself of ego is to practice asceticism secretly and publicly act unlawfully in order to humiliate the nafs from all angles, from both external agents and from the Malamati himself. To illustrate such a practice it is said that a saint “was hailed by a large crowd when he entered a town; they tried to accompany the great saint; but on the road he publicly started urinating in an unlawful way so that all of them left him and no longer believed in his high spiritual rank. According to the Malamati, this saint was virtuous in his unlawfulness.

The term Qalandariyyat (the Qalandar condition) appears to be first applied by Sanai Ghaznavi (died 1131) in seminal poetic works where diverse practices are described. Particular to the qalandar genre of poetry are terms that refer to gambling, games, intoxicants and “Nazar ila’l-murd”.

The meditation known in Arabic as Naẓar ila’l-murd (Arabic: النظر إلى المرد‎), “contemplation of the beardless” is a Sufi practice of spiritual realization.

Conservative Islamic theologians condemned the custom of contemplating the beauty of boys. Their suspicions may have been justified, as some dervishes boasted of enjoying far more than “glances”, or even kisses. Nazar was denounced as rank heresy by such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), who complained, “They kiss a slave boy and claim to have seen God!” Some say that the writings of qalandars were not a mere celebration of libertinism, but antinomial practices of affirmation from negative action. Peter Lamborn Wilson claims this as the use of “imaginal yoga” to transmute erotic desire into spiritual consciousness. (And advocates pederasty). The real danger to conventional religion, he says, is not so much the mixing of sodomy with worship, but “the claim that human beings can realize themselves in love more perfectly than in religious practices”.

Authorities invariably have taken a dim view of these theories.

Despite opposition from the clerics, the practice has survived in Islamic countries until only recent years, according to Murray and Roscoe in their work on Islamic homosexualities. I recommend a visit to Tangier. The practice thrives there, though nobody bothers to claim connection to god through it anymore.