This book was incredibly dense and took a long time to read and note. I don’t think it is especially well written but it is definitely full of interesting information. Each chapter introduces different behavioural or psychological theories and experiments and discusses their effects on decision making and everyday life. Despite the five part structure, the sheer volume of information makes this a tough book to grapple with. It read like a detailed summary of successive scientific papers.
While it’s welcome to have scientific language simplified (e.g. the two systems, Econs and Humans etc.) it was still prone to arcane flourishes. Kahneman is simultaneously writing technically and also attempting to make it readable for ‘the layperson’ and, while he is more successful at the former, the combination isn’t a tasty literary concoction. I think a lot of this is due to his limited ability to write flowing, enjoyable prose. Similarly, on the whole it is probably a good thing that Kahneman doesn’t exacerbate the problems of density by going into the minutiae of academic debate for each idea he introduces. Especially as Psychology seems jargon prone. On the other hand, sometimes this can make the book seem arrogant and overreaching. Clearly, when dealing with such complicated subjects there is a balance to be struck between the, undoubtedly necessary, task of simplification for the lay reader and avoiding overinterpreting the significance of the studies and experiments that are being used as examples. Occasionally, it feels like he draws very wide-reaching and concrete conclusions about huge swathes of human behaviour from fairly limited, specifically designed experimentation. Perhaps it is just because most of these experiments involve asking people strange trick questions in a lab in Oregon or Jerusalem and feel, intuitively, a bit weird and otherworldly! These experiments always yield interesting insights into human behaviour, however, as Kahneman would surely recognise, the context is key. Kahneman seems gifted in identifying other areas of relevance and application for his, seemingly esoteric, findings but sometimes it feels like he slightly oversteps the mark. Like a good scientist should, Kahneman wants to measure and test his hypothesis against empirical data and I don’t feel like he should be critcised for this. His DRM struck me as mad immediately but maybe inspired. I wondered how reliable U-scores could ever really be. Every now and then I felt like the precisely formulated, laboratory tested studies and empirical measures of happiness he references may not apply to everyday life quite as broadly as he wants them too. Of course, it’s a complex area, and one that needs to be simplified, but sometimes his assertions or conclusions felt one-sided and unchallenged. Kahneman also likes to write quite combatively against academics who disagree with him and this all seemed a bit petty to me even though some of the opinions, as described by Kahneman, are worthy of derision. Even though he may not be the most eloquent writer, in terms of content this book is full of interesting ideas and experiments.
Kahneman is a clear-ish guide through a fascinating, highly complex and jargon ridden subject. The combination of the sheer density and Kahneman’s scientific literary style didn’t make it an especially easy or enjoyable read but the quality of the ideas made up for that. I found myself thinking or talking about the book lots as I plodded my way through it, reading, digesting and noting. For that reason this book gave me a lot more pleasure and enjoyment than the basic act of reading the book, which was always interesting but not usually a pleasure! I hope I’ll look back over the excessive notes I’ve taken as there is altogether too much to take in with this book. I am convinced I would never feel like picking it up again to re-read it but I also feel like there is a lot of information that I would like to go over again. This was a fascinating read but also a bit of a slog.
NOTES
PART 1: TWO SYSTEMS
CHAPTER 1 & 2
Most people have a poor intuitive grasp of statistics, even specialists in the field.
The mind has, broadly, two systems of operation. System 1 is intuitive and fast and helps us to respond to everyday questions like, ‘what is 2x2? What is the capital of France?’ System 2 is slower and involves deliberate analysis and processing of information and is used for questions like, ‘what is 15 x 27?’.
Most people believe they use System 2 most of the time to make most of their decisions but this is an illusion. Kahneman describes System 2 as a supporting actress in a film who thinks she is the lead role.
Pupil dilation is highly associated with level of concentration or System 2 thinking, when System 2 is engaged other mental processing will be severely impaired (e.g. gorilla appearing in video of basketball players passing a ball when people have been asked to count the number of passes, people stop to think when you ask them a question that involves lots of System 2 thinking when they are walking)
CHAPTER 3
System 2 also operates self-control so when people are occupied with a complex cognitive task they are more likely to make impulsive decisions as System 1 takes over, or operates more freely, than it would if System 2 wasn’t occupied elsewhere.
Exercising self control makes people fatigued both mentally and physically so if subjects are asked to suppress emotions or other functions of System 1 they will then perform less well in subsequent self-control tasks because they are suffering ‘ego depletion’. The effects of this can be reversed by consuming glucose. Being drunk also weakens System 2 and increases the likelihood of reverting to standard / intuitive operating procedure as opposed to thinking things through using System 2.
System 2 is also responsible for checking suggested answers to questions / situations provided by System 1. Best e.g. was “A bat and ball cost 1.10 and the bat is a dollar more than the ball, how much is the ball?” where the intuitive answer is 0.10 but, with checking, it’s not hard to see it is 0.05. 50% of Harvard, MIT and Princeton students got this wrong and >80% at less selective universities. It’s not so much that it is really hard, it is more that most people are lazy and reluctant to engage System 2 as it costs more work / energy and is a bit unpleasant. Most prefer to follow the law of least effort.
CHAPTER 4
When the brain sees a word or image it makes a large number of associations instantly using the unconscious System 1.
If people are exposed to certain words associated with a certain topic this ‘primes’ their brain to make these connections more strongly. For example, if a person sees the word EAT and then is asked to complete SO_P they will be more likely to say SOUP and if they have been primed with WASH then it will be SOAP. John Bargh at NYU did a study where subjects were asked to arrange random words into sentences and then walk down the corridor to do another test. Those subjects who had received words associated with elderiness walked more slowly than others because their behaviour had been primed with ideas about oldness and this had an effect on their physical actions! This is called ‘the ideomotor effect’ . It also works in reverse, adopting certain physical actions can affect the way your brain receives or perceives information. For instance, being asked to nod while you listen to opinions makes you more likely to agree with them and being asked to shake your head less. In this last example, the subjects were told they were testing the sound quality of headphones under motion so they were not focussed on the opinions being played through the headphones even though they were later asked about them.
Priming also happens with objects, for example, people who vote near a school or see school related pictures before they vote will be more likely to vote in favour of increased educational spending. People who are primed for money become more diligent and more selfish. Money primes for individualism and a reduced desire to help other people. In a similar strain, pictures of the leader in dictatorships are supposed to increase obedience; as do forms of priming involving the military. Another good example is an experiment where different pictures were placed above an honesty box week after week. People consistently contributed more when a pair of eyes were there vs. pictures of flowers. All these examples show that in lots of situations where we firmly believe that we are making decisions using only, or mainly, System 2; the role of System 1 is actually far larger than we give it credit for.
CHAPTER 5
Cognitive ease is associated with everything being fine, cognitive strain usually means something is going wrong, is threatening or requires attention. Things that make cognition easier are more likely to make you believe things are true. Familiarity is closely associated with perceptions of truth because it eases cognition. However, the whole proposition does not have to be repeated to increase familiarity - see the e.g. of priming above. Familiarity, priming, clear and easy display of info and either being in a good mood or mimicking the body language of being in a good mood will all produce the same feelings of ease associated with truth.
When writing, high quality paper with bold type that maximises the contrast between the two is preferable. Using bright blue or red, simple language, rhyming aphorisms and quoting sources with simple names increases ease and therefore credibility. This makes everything easy to process and so System 2 isn’t engaged meaning you’re more likely to trust your intuition that everything is fine because nothing is arousing your subconscious suspicion.
Equally, when things aren’t clear and cognition is strained then this will make you engage System 2 and, ordinarily, make more critical judgements although it will decrease creativity. The 2nd and 3rd parts of the bat and ball question are: 1) if it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long will it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? 100 mins or 5 mins. 2) If a lily doubles in size everyday and covers an entire lake in 48 days, how many days does it take to cover half? 24 days or 47. If printed clearly, 90% of people make at least one mistake in the three questions, but if printed faintly then only 35% make a mistake because System 2 is alerted and engaged by the cognitive strain of the faint print!!
Stocks with pronounceable tickers or names may outperform those without for some time periods!
Most novel stimuli are treated with suspicion by animals and humans. But if continually exposed with no negative consequences then this turns into a positive emotion associated with cognitive ease. Many experiments show that ‘mere exposure’ to an otherwise meaningless word, symbol or shape make people associate positively with it! Has big implications for brands - I imagine!
Being in a happy mood increases the capability of System 1 whereas being in a bad mood decreases it meaning that being unhappy decreases intuition and creativity. System 1 is associated with good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility. System 2 is associated with sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach and increased effort.
CHAPTER 6
System 1 does a lot of work establishing norms and detecting when these have been violated. Examples given include not being so surprised by something unexpected the second time it happens, even though System 2 realises this is actually less likely, because System 1 has accepted this event as ‘more normal’. Very little repetition is required for something to begin to seem ‘normal’. System 1 has huge associative networks which allow it to understand language very quickly and spot discrepancies in highly nuanced ways. Example given is “the large mouse steps over the small elephant’s trunk”, where the words ‘large’ and ‘small’ function within normal expectations of the associations made with those animals. Another experiment registered participant’s detection of abnormality when an upper class voice says, “i have a large tattoo on my back”. This sort of deduction requires a lot of complex world knowledge but, interestingly, doesn’t involve any conscious System 2 ‘thinking’.
Hume saw causality as learned from observation but in the 1940s Michotte showed that the causality we observe between billiard balls or when knocking things over also extends to black squares drawn on a piece of paper where one moves into another and then the other starts moving. There is no physical ‘cause’ here but humans recognise it as one moving the other early as 2 years old and are surprised when it breaks down! We are hard wired to ‘see’ causes regardless of whether they exist or not. This reminds me of Tolstoy in W&P:
The human mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in the human soul. And the human mind, without considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, seizes the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible, and says: ‘This is the cause!’
And to go even further into metaphysics:
There is, and can be, no cause of a historical event except the one cause of all causes.
Both from Book 13, Chapter 1
Similarly, psychologists Heider and Simmel use a video of a large triangle, a small triangle and a circle moving around a box, that looks like a house in plan view with a door, to demonstrate how humans are hard wired to create narratives and ascribe characteristics to things. These objects could be seen as moving randomly around a box but almost everyone describes the same story of a bullying large triangle being overcome by the small triangle and the circle teaming up. It’s hard not to if you watch the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTNmLt7QX8E
Humans also experience what we think of as freely willed action as different from physical causality. Our own physical actions are seen as controlled by a non-physical mind, whereas a door opening and knocking something over is seen as physical cause. Psychologist Bloom sees this as an explanation for the universality of religion; the world of objects is seperate from the world of minds so we can think of soulless bodies and bodiless souls. Because of these two types of cause most religions conceive of an immaterial creator of all physical things and the idea of immortal souls controlling bodies and out lasting them when they die. [Latter also fulfils a lot of egoistic wishes imo!!]
CHAPTER 7
System 1 jumps to conclusions and does not deal in uncertainty and doubt, which are the domain of System 2. System 1 suggests an immediate, unequivocal response without expending mental effort on conscious thought or consideration of alternatives.
Daniel Gilbert, psychologist, posits that System 1 always makes an attempt to believe any statement it is confronted with. System 2 will then analyse this attempt in order to see if it should be unbelieved. However, if System 2 is kept busy with a task then people are more likely to believe nonsensical statements because they are more reliant on System 1. System 1 is gullible and biased to believing, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving. But if System 2 is occupied / lazy, or if people are tired or otherwise depleted, they are more likely to believe empty, persuasive messages like advertising.
Unlike science, the brain tests hypotheses by trying to prove them not to refute them; our brains search for supporting evidence for a statement rather than the opposite.
People are biased towards agreeing with other individuals that they like or have a pre-existing positive view of. This is called ‘the halo effect’ whereby if we meet someone and we like them then we assume they have other positive attributes without any evidence. First impressions are almost always the strongest and can be almost impossible to reverse, even in the presence of substantial contrary evidence. It is important to be aware of this bias and to try and mitigate it - e.g. randomise papers when marking, get people to write down opinions simultaneously in a meeting rather than stating them verbally in turn.
What you see is all there is (WYSIATI), System 1 excels at creating a believable story from the information available, even if it is scant and imperfect, but it doesn’t use any information that isn’t immediately available. WYSIATI facilitates the achievement of coherence and of the cognitive ease that causes us to accept a statement as true. We will often not seek out, or actively repress, information that doesn’t fit the System 1 generated narrative. In this way we are hard wired to jump to conclusions.
CHAPTER 8
System 1 makes rapid basic assessments about safety and familiarity. It is a survival mechanism that is constantly scanning the environment, in the background, for threats, opportunities or cues to approach or avoid. Facial assessments are a major part of human System 1 and probably make up a much larger part of decision making than most people are willing to admit. This can be demonstrated by an experiment where subjects are shown the faces of competing candidates for an election they are unaware of and do not have other knowledge of. In 70% of cases, the judgements made solely on facial assessment match the eventual results of the voters who are supposedly making more informed, System 2 driven choices! This effect is 3x larger for people who watch a lot of TV and don’t seek out other information (aka read!) - THE IDIOT BOX!
System 1 represents categories by a prototype or set of typical exemplars - i.e. it can quickly tell you how how many objects there are in an array (if it is small) and what the average of such an array is - however, it does not deal well with “sum like variables” which require System 2. For example, what is the total length of 4 lines in a box. Most people will quickly identify there are 4 and what the average length is intuitively. Another example is asking different groups how much they would pay to save 2k, 20k or 200k birds after an oil spill; the results are substantially the same indicating that there is an almost complete neglect of quantity in emotional contexts. [Also could be lack of comprehension of large numbers, “one man’s death is a tragedy…”]
System 1 also performs ‘intensity matching’ where one fact or thing is equated to another. For example, matching the tone of a colour or the loudness of a sound to the severity of a crime or punishment. Or answering the question, how tall is a person who is as intelligent as Jim?
System 1 is also a ‘mental shotgun’ that scatterguns more computations than it has been asked to do. For example, comparing the spelling of pairs of words when it has only be asked to compare the sounds or comparing the metaphorical truth of statements when it has only been asked to compare the literal truth. These ‘excess’, hardwired computations are involuntary and happen even though they may be detrimental to completion of the task the brain is being asked to perform.
CHAPTER 9
It is remarkable how seldom we are stumped in normal mental life. We have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything without analysing them.
Much of this is use of heuristics, from the same root as ‘Eureka’, whereby we can’t answer the question but substitute it for one we can answer and then use intensity mapping to relate that answer to the original question. A good example of this is a visual trick where subjects are asked if the figure on the right is larger than the one on the left in the following picture:
Everyone will say yes because our mind substitutes 3D size for 2D size because of the perspective of the picture. Actually they are the same size. We should ignore these visual cues to interpret it as a 3D scene because the question is only about figure in the picture but it is too powerful to resist!
Another powerful example is a questionnaire in which people are asked ‘how happy are you?’ and ‘how many dates have you been on in the past month?’. If they are asked in this order then the correlation between the two answers is zero. But if the dating question is asked first then participants substitute a complex assessment of happiness for happiness with their love life because it is easily available and the correlation becomes very high. The same is true if the question is about family or finances rather than dating. It is an example of WYSIATI and demonstrates how much influence current mood and context has on assessment of happiness.
Paul Slovic proposes an ‘affect heuristic’ whereby we let our likes and dislikes determine our beliefs about the world. Here System 2 is more compliant with System 1 and searches for information to support the pre-existing beliefs of System 1 rather than criticising them. I have experienced this a lot in reading research about companies on the stock exchange.
PART TWO: HEURISTICS AND BIASES
CHAPTER 10
Statistically extreme outcomes are much more likely in small sample sizes of a random population. E.G. - in a binary draw of 4 black/white balls the prob of them all being black is 12.5% whereas with 7 it is 1.56%. However, when we see a statement like ‘cancer rates lowest in rural, republican counties in the midwest’ we try to make causal links to explain this when really it is a statistical phenomenon caused by the smaller sample sizes in rural communities. This can been seen clearly in the example because the same type of communities have the highest incidence of cancer too, demonstrating there is no causal link beyond the statistical one. Amos and Kahneman showed that intuitive feel for statistically appropriate sample sizes was poor among other academic scientists. The difference between 6 and 60m is intuitive but the difference between 150 and 3,000 is less so. As System 1 thinking is not prone to doubt we see a small-ish sample size but are predisposed to ‘over-believe’ its resemblance of a much larger general population because we prefer certainty over doubt.
Interesting examples include the desire to identify patterns where none exist and think that random events are somehow unlikely or represent some cause. E.g. most people think the series of babies born in a hospital BBBBBB or GGGBBB are somehow rare when they have just the same probability as other outcomes.
“To the untrained eye, randomness appears as regularity or a tendency to cluster” Feller
Other example is the ‘hot hand’ myth in basketball, a player is assumed to be more likely to score because he has been successful on a hot streak of shots when really this is just randomness. “We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.”
Gates Foundations spent $1.7bn on program to reduce school sizes because they surveyed c.1k schools and found that small schools were statistically over-represented in the best schools. However, they were also over-represented in the worst schools because of the propensity of small sample sizes to produce extreme results!
CHAPTER 11
The strength of the ‘anchoring effect’ will mean any number you are asked to to consider as a possible solution to an estimation problem will induce an anchoring effect in the answers given. This anchoring takes place in both Systems 1+2 by different methods. In System 2 the number mentioned forms the anchor around which the estimator moves their estimate until it reaches a plausible level but stops when uncertainty begins to creep in, especially if they are mentally depleted / slightly drunk. In System 1 it is more a priming effect whereby the number sets off the selective activation of compatible memories as it attempts to construct a story where the anchor number is true because it has been primed to do so, not because of any logical connection between the anchor number and the number they’re being asked to estimate. Most people are sceptical about anchoring because it seems so obvious and they often know that the anchor number is not informative but its effect is very powerful and universal nonetheless.
Setting a ‘limit per customer’ for discounted items can positively affect sales. Also, in negotiations, it is best not to engage with a derogatory low offers as it has an anchoring effect too; author advises making a scene and forcing the other side to make a more reasonable bid so the gap in expectations doesn’t start out too big.
CHAPTER 12
The ‘availability heuristic’ substitutes information about how frequent something is (e.g. divorce under 60 or people killed by sharks) by answering a different question about how easy it was to retrieve examples of this happening and then using this to comment on frequency. Things will be easily available if they happened to famous people (celeb divorce), if they are in the news a lot (shark attacks) or if you have a personal connection or remembrance of that type of event. None of these causes of easy retrieval has a statistical basis or character. In collaborative efforts or teams members usually overestimate their contribution to outcomes, especially positive ones*, because the availability heuristic brings forward lots of examples of what they have done individually but doesn’t do the same for the other members.
*success always has many parents but failure is always an orphan
The ease with which experiences are recalled is much more important than the number. People asked to recall 6 or 12 instances of assertiveness and then judge their assertiveness rated themselves more assertive with 6 instances, because this number is more fluently recalled, than with 12 because with this number fluency is reduced even though the absolute quantity of evidence is larger. In this way people actually become LESS confident about a choice the more arguments they are asked to produce to support it or LESS impressed with a car the more advantages are listed about it! One professor asked students to list varying numbers of improvements that could be made to the course - the higher the number the more satisfied the students were with the course.
However, this heuristic can be reversed if an explanation for the increased difficulty, and reduced fluency, of recall is provided regardless of how spurious it is (colour of text, background music etc.). Under these conditions, people don’t use it as a heuristic and rate themselves in the same way as if they had retrieved fewer examples with more ease and fluency. As such, it is more an ‘unexpected loss of fluency’ that occurs more rapidly than System 1 anticipates that causes this to be used as a heuristic. The more one concentrates and engages System 2 in this kind of environment, the more likely you are to use the content to guide your decisions and the less likely you are to use fluency. The more confident or powerful someone feels, or is reminded of feeling, the more likely they will use System 1 more heavily and trust their intuition.
CHAPTER 13
People, in general, rate unusual or unlikely events with negative consequences as more likely than they actually are. This is in part because they are over-represented in the media, in part because people want to read about them and therefore they are in the media more often, and also because triggering frightening thoughts and images come easily and, if they are fluent and vivid, exacerbate fear. This is a good example of how associative memory works and how difficult questions like, ‘do more people die of diabetes or accidents?’, are usually answered by substitution for easier questions like, ‘what ideas can i easily associate with either of these topics?’.
Paul Slovic develops the idea of an ‘affect heuristic’ whereby difficult questions (e.g. what is the balance of benefits and risks associated with water fluoridation?) is substituted for, ‘do I like water fluoridation?’ or ‘how do i feel about it?’. The answers to these easier questions are then fleshed out with ‘rational’ examples; in this way, ‘the emotional tail wags the rational dog’ (Haidt), which is accurate as most people would perceive their actions the other way round. People seem to find it hard to hold balanced views and will normally list lots of benefits and few risks or vice versa. The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.
Slovic speaks about ‘risk’ as a wholly subjective measure depending on which perspective one takes. Others reject this and believe that important judgements can be made probabilistically using number of human years saved and cost as determinants. Slovic would argue that the inability of most people to correctly assess minor risks (they are usually ignored or hugely overestimated) is legitimate as ‘risk’ only exists as a concept in the minds of those people who feel it. On the other hand, others (e.g. Sunstein) would see it as a serious problem that most people only think about the numerator and ignore the denominator when thinking about low probability risk (he calls this probability neglect) as it causes inefficient regulatory and legal outcomes / actions. He thinks this probability neglect combined with ‘availability cascades’, whereby a certain story or issue becomes especially prominent for a short period of time and thus occupies a disproportionate amount of visibility in the public perception, are risks to effective policy and should be tempered by the opinions of ‘experts’. Both arguments have merit; allocation of public resources should be as efficient as possible but decisions cannot be made without the public's approval in a democracy. [At the end of the day, I suspect that the eventual outcomes from most major decisions are too nonlinear to model or assess accurately!!]
CHAPTER 14
‘Representativeness’ vs. probability. Kahneman recalls an experiment he designed with Amos where a hypothetical student is presented as possibly studying 9 subjects. Here, people guess based on how large the student numbers in each subject are (called ‘base rate’) and perhaps adjust this using the info that he is a man. After this, participants are given a character sketch of ‘Tom’ and are told it is of dubious value. Nonetheless, people then ranked the subjects differently because the description was written to be highly representative of a ‘geeky’ or ‘nerdy’ stereotype. This shows how quickly and strongly people are swayed by mental stereotypes even when this is described as of debatable value. If people were rational then they would rank the subjects on size of student in take alone and not give much weight to the iffy character sketch. In reality, uncertain questions about probability trigger a mental shotgun that immediately proposes a System 1 style narrative based on the information they have available. In this kind of thinking, representativeness seems to hugely, and wrongly, outweigh base rate. Seems similar to chapter 6 where people almost cannot resist making up a narrative / character even when it may not be appropriate to do so. System 1 hardwires us to construct believable narratives. However, engaging System 2 has been shown to reduce this tendency in some experiments; for example, frowning while calculating their guesses.
The Tom W example might be interesting to conduct with EXPLICIT base rates given to the participants to see how they react.
In general, the advice of this chapter is to invoke Bayesian thinking when assessing uncertain probability in light of new information. Stick quite close to the base rate unless the evidence is very strong because we are naturally hardwired to prefer the specificity and narrative ease of representativeness. E.g. - is a ‘shy poetry loving woman’ more likely to be an MBA or a Chinese literature student? Answer should be MBA because even if there aren’t many shy, poetry loving MBAs it will be higher than because there are lots of MBAs vs. hardly any Chinese students - i.e. base rate is far more important despite our lazy preference for specific narratives and the representativeness heuristic.
CHAPTER 15
Another experiment conducted by K&T, called ‘Linda’, also concerns the persuasive nature of similarity to stereotype. As with Tom W, Linda is described as intelligent, interested in social justice, a philosophy grad etc etc and then participants are asked to rank her career based on 7 options. Those 7 options included ‘bank teller’ and ‘bank teller active in feminist movement’. Against statistical and logical likelihood, almost everyone ranks bank teller + feminism above just bank teller, because it fits with the narrative they have been given about Linda. Most people (89%) don’t realise / care that the chance of her being a feminist bank teller MUST be lower than just a bank teller, statistically speaking, because the first is a subset of the second. Even when the experiment was modified to ask which of these two bank telling options is more likely, excluding all other options, still 85-90% of undergrads preferred the more richly detailed feminist option. Only a sample of Stanford grads in social sciences got it right (65%) of any of the studies conducted. This shows the brain prefers possibilities with more detail that are plausible even though they are logically less likely. Coherence, plausibility and probability are obv easily confused! However, examples like - which is more likely: Aly is a teacher or Aly is a teacher who walks to work - do not cause the fallacy to occur because the STORY isn’t any richer, better or more plausible. In the absence of a competing and persuasive intuition, logic seems to prevail.
Other psychologists conducted experiments whereby participants guessed the value of sets of dinner plates or baseball cards. When judged together, dinner sets with all the plates and some extra items (some broken some not) and sets of high value baseball cards (some with some mediocre ones thrown in too) were correctly judged to be higher value if they included extra items as this adds at least SOME value to the sum calculation of total value. However, when the sets were judged individually, without comparison, the sets with extra, lower value, items were judged to be worth less - called the MORE IS LESS principle - because they were perceived to damage the value of the whole set, indicating intuition and presumption about consumer items too. In these cases (plates, cards), joint evaluation can overcome the ‘conjunction fallacy’ (i.e. adding items reduces value or increasing specificity increases probability) but with Linda this was not the case because money is easier to quantify than probability.
Another example that demonstrates the primacy of plausibility over logic concerned a 6-sided die with 4 green faces and 2 red ones. When asked which was more likely:
RGRRR
GRGRRR
GRRRRR
Most people choose 2 because it has more Gs (as you would expect given the 2:1 ratio of G:R) however, B is just A with a G added to the front which MUST necessarily reduce its probability vs. A! 2/3rds of respondents preferred option B.
There is some evidence that performance can be improved by using the language like ‘out of 100 people’ vs. ‘what percentage’ because then people may conjure a visual image which makes it easier to identify one group as a subset of another in questions like ‘what percentage of men surveyed have had a stroke?’ vs. ‘what percentage of men surveyed over 55 have had a stroke?’
The dishes / baseball card experiment and Linda have the same structure but in the Linda example intuition still beats logic even in joint valuation whereas this is reversed in joint evaluation of plates / cards. This seems to show that probability is harder to assess than money, plausibility trumps probability in detailed, coherent examples and that System 2 is lazy in criticising plausible narratives that appeal to System 1!
CHAPTER 16
This example concerns the mind’s hunger for causal stories and how it prioritises causal information. The example is as follows: in a city 85% of cabs are green and 15% blue, an accident occurs and a witness says it involves a blue cab. The reliability of their testimony is tested and determined to be 80% correct, 20% incorrect. What is the prob that the cab was Blue rather than Green? The answer is 41% according to Bayes but many people answer 80% because this statistic is relevant and can be linked causally in a narrative to the accident. The example is then modified so that green and blue cabs represent 50% of the total but green cabs are involved in 85% of accidents. The information about the witness is the same. In the second iteration, answers are a lot closer to the accurate answer because people take the statistic about green cabs being involved in 85% of accidents into account whereas they don’t use the ‘base rate’ stats about the colour split of cabs in the city because it doesn’t seem relevant to the SPECIFIC story of the accident. This is the difference between ‘statistical base rates’ and ‘causal base rates’. The solution is the same in both questions but people do far better in the second because they see the info as ‘relevant’ (causal) and give it more weight in their calculations. This is an example of stereotyping, which Kahneman thinks is rightly illegal in most legal situations as it leads to a better, more equal society, but he does think there is a cost to not using this heuristic.
Another example involves asking participants to decide if a student passed a test or not based on some short info. In one exam, participants are told that 75% passed and in another only 25%. These causal base rates had a significant sway on participants guesses. However, if respondents were told that the person who selected the sample of students did so in a manner that meant 75% of the sample had failed this had a lesser effect because people didn’t seem to see a causal link. [this is very odd to me as they are saying the same thing]. This seems to show that System 1 can deal with stories in which elements are causally linked but it is weak in statistical reasoning.
However, not all causal base rates are used to improve understanding of a situation if they conflict with existing intuitions or ideas. The ‘helping experiment’ involves taking 6 people who all sit in booths and take turns to speak into a microphone about their personal life and problems. One of the participants is a stooge. The stooge speaks first and says they are having trouble adjusting to NY and are prone to seizures. Everyone else speaks then the stooge speaks again and pretends to be having a seizure, says he is dying and asks for help before the mic is turned off. Of 15 participants, only 4 came to his help immediately, 6 never left their booths and 5 did so only long after the victim had apparently started choking! Here we would expect to see people apply this to their own behaviour, or the behaviour of an average person, as they would a causal base rate. To test this, the psychologists who designed the test (Nisbett & Borgida) asked students to watch a short video of two participants where they discuss their lives and appear nice and normal and then guess how long it took them to respond to the choking person’s request for help. To use a Bayesian approach, only 4/15 helped immediately = 27% so the base rate is roughly 75% did not help. The information in the short videos does not modify this probability. The psychologists showed the films to two sets of students: those who knew the results of the test and those who did not. But the results were EXACTLY the same!! This seems to indicate that the students are stupid in the case of the ones who knew the results. However, the professors conclude that people “quietly exclude” themselves, friends and even people on a video from conclusions of experiments that surprise them. In a follow up experiment, they showed the same two videos, explained the procedure of the test but not the results and then told them neither of the two people helped. They then asked the students to guess the global results, and the their guesses were remarkably accurate. Here it seems that it is hard for people to apply a general, but unpleasant, truth to individuals but they are capable of making an individual observation apply generally. The experimenters said, “subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular”. Surprising individual cases have a much stronger effect on our thinking than general information, which we seems to disregard in the face of personal experience or long-held beliefs.
Causal stats have a far larger effect on thinking that non-causal even if both are equally relevant because of System 1 narrative building and stereotyping. However, even very persuasive causal stats can have a hard time overcoming long held beliefs. Individual examples are far more effective in changing thinking and behaviour. People may remember surprising stats about human behaviour and may even repeat it to friends but will still fall back on their earlier beliefs if it is presented in a ‘general’ format whereas the reverse is true of individual cases or personal experience. [this seems to have a parallel in stocks - e.g. ‘all commodity companies are crooks’ but when you meet one you think ‘surely not them as most businessmen are competent / honest or else they wouldn't succeed’ then you lose your shirt in one and always remember it!!]
CHAPTER 17
Reward for improved performance in training is more effective than punishment for poor performance. It may not seem like this to an instructor because of regression to the mean e.g. when an instructor praises good performance it usually gets worse afterwards; when he criticises bad performance it gets better. Because of the human brain’s love of causal stories, regression to the mean is often explained in causal terms (e.g. the Sports Illustrated jinx). Statistically, variance doesn’t need a causal explanation but the mind wants one!
Regression to the mean was discovered by Francis Galton (half cousin of Charles Darwin) in 1886. Correlation and regression to the mean are not two concepts but rather different perspectives on the same concept. Whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean. Again, the desire for causal explanations plays a role. Between the two statements:
Intelligent women tend to marry less intelligent men
The correlation between intelligence scores of spouses is less than perfect
1 seems to cry out for a causal explanation whereas 2 seems to be a far less interesting statement of fact although they are a statement of exactly the same thing. We are strongly biased towards causal explanations and seek them out whereas mere statistics do not appeal to our minds. Mean regression has an explanation but doesn’t have a cause and therefore doesn’t appeal much to our minds. System 1 makes insistent demands for causal explanations! Also, it seems reasonable to link predictions to evaluations of evidence meaning that we won’t learn to understand mean regression from experience; it is counter intuitive.
CHAPTER 18
In general, people substitute evaluation of evidence for prediction. When people should be thinking statistically for predictions they are instead letting their System 1 thinking take over and equating their evaluation with prediction because it is an easier question to ask. For example, participants asked to rank a student based on a short report (evaluation) and then asked to predict their future performance (prediction) usually substitute the first for the second via intensity matching without taking mean regression into account.
Another example involves a woman, Julie, who participants are told learned to read age 4. They are then asked to predict her GPA. Here most people ‘predict’ a high GPA like 3.7 or 3.8 because they substitute the hard question of predicting GPA for the easy question of evaluating how precocious it is to read at 4. Kahneman advises the following procedure for mitigating this kind of knee-jerk, System 1, heuristic:
Estimate average GPA
Estimate GPA that matches the evidence (e.g. reading at 4)
Estimate correlation between the two (30%?)
Move 30% higher from average GPA to the far higher GPA your ‘intuition’ suggests
When assessing probability or numerical outcomes it is best to start with the ‘base rate’ figure and the figure suggested by intuition and then assess how relevant the information on which your intuition was built is (i.e. what is the correlation between info and what you’re being asked to guess). If correlation is 1, stick with intuition, if it is 0, stick with base rate and sliding scale in between.
This kind of thinking can be difficult to implement because following our intuitions seems more natural and somehow more pleasant (cf. gambling) than acting against them. For me it is also interesting to think about how we react to success / failure based on intuitive / researched guesses; is it more enjoyable to ‘win’ when following an intuition? Or is ‘losing’ harder to deal with when you have overridden your intuition using stats?
System 1 is keen on extreme predictions and is willing to predict extreme events from weak evidence. Because System 1 takes any evidence there is and uses that to create as convincing a story as possible it tends to overestimate the relevance of that information and lead to overconfidence in the ‘prediction’ put forward.
PART THREE: OVERCONFIDENCE
CHAPTER 19
The mind prefers events, things that actually happened, to non-events, things that could have happened but didn’t. As such, when we hear stories of business success we are likely to overestimate the role of skill and underplay the role of luck. This is called ‘narrative fallacy’. Part of this arises from the way stories are told, they usually include causality! This is pernicious as it gives people the idea that they understand the past and therefore can know about the future. Really, the future is unknowable [shout out Keynes!]. This quote struck me as very descriptive of normal thought, “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” p201 and “these illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence” p205. System 1 is a sense-making machine for these reasons. People modify their beliefs with the benefit of new information but find it VERY hard to recall their former beliefs instead retrieving their current ones in an instance of substitution. This is called the ‘hindsight bias’ or the i-knew-it-all-along effect and seems to arise from our mind’s desire to make sense of the world. In experiments where people are asked to ascribe a probability to an event and then recall that probability later after the event has / hasn’t happened - most overestimate the probability they ascribed to things that did happen and vice versa. Here the bias is driven by the outcome. Most people match their opinions to fit the outcome and are unaware of this. Most struggle with the concept of a ‘good’ prediction or bet that doesn’t actually happen. As with the example of the successful business, people wait until it is successful before they call the founders geniuses!! [Another example I can think of is rogue traders; everyone knows of the examples where they lost money but when was one ever fired for taking too much risk and making money? He probably got a promotion!!]
Says that research shows that the, generous, correlation between success of a firm and CEO is 0.3 meaning in a pair of otherwise identical firms the one with the better CEO will outperform 60% of the time, only 10% more than chance (0.5). I wonder how this was tested?? This would be much lower for fund managers! The fact that many CEOs are hero worshipped is, according to Kahneman, partly because of the need for clear, causal stories and partly the halo effect. Most assessments of ‘best practice’ or ‘visionary CEOs’ have the causal relationship upside down. The firm is considered to be succeeding because the CEO is brilliant when really the CEO is considered to be brilliant because the firm is succeeding - exactly the same in the case of failing businesses / badly perceived CEOs.
CHAPTER 20
“Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and is also essential.”
Kahneman used to test soldiers leadership and problem solving abilities with tasks and then make recommendations about which ones were suitable for officer training. When feedback about the soldiers who went on to officer training showed that these predictions were little better than random guesses, Kahneman felt that this should have shattered his confidence in the predictive value of his judgements. However, it continued to feel sensible and valid to make assessments based on what he saw and he called this ‘the illusion of validity’. It was easy to draw conclusions from what he saw and these conclusions seemed legitimate leading to confidence - the result of a combination of coherent information and cognitive ease of processing.
Gives fund management as an example of this, which is fair enough! Two in three mutual funds underperform the market and year-to-year correlation is barely higher than zero. Against this, you might use the argument Buffett makes in ‘The Investors of Graham and Doddsville’.
Both of these examples show that individual experience is far more persuasive than obscure statistics. In the financial industry, it may also be a result of these people existing in a community of like-minded believers. Most finance professionals probably think themselves better than other people and believe they can do what others cannot; it is inherently arrogant. I have always believed arrogance to be a fundamental truth about fund managers.
The unpredictability of the future is undermined by ease with which the past is explained with the benefit of hindsight.
Mentions an interesting sounding book Expert Political Judgement by Philip Tetlock where the accuracy of expert predictions are tested. In general, people who know a bit more are a bit better than people who know less but experts suffer from overconfidence and make worse predictions. This was especially true of experts who were in the limelight when asked for their opinion, which gives pause for thought about all the expert opinions we are offered in the media every day. Unsurprisingly, experts had a lot of excuses when they were confronted with the fact that they had been wrong!
CHAPTER 21
Psychologist Paul Meehl wrote a book that claimed statistical predictions almost always outperformed clinical ones called Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence. One reasons for this, according to Meehl, is that ‘experts’ overcomplicate things in their predictions. For this reason, humans will underperform an algorithm even if the humans are given the results of the algorithm because they will feel they can overrule it to take advantage of more complex relationships between factors that they perceive! Expert judgement is also very inconsistent and will give different outcomes when confronted with the same material on different occasions; probably because of the priming effect of minute factors that takes place in our System 1 minds. Over confidence also plays a role; humans will ordinarily place too much weight in their own judgements and not enough in empirical factors thus reducing validity. Furthermore, a formula constructed on the back of an envelope can usually compete with an optimally weighted formula. Atul Garwande’s A Checklist Manifesto and the investor Mohnish Prabhai are other examples of this principle.
Clinical psychologists reacted to this work with disbelief and hostility. Some of this is because clinical psychologists do have skill in making short term predictions, an area in which they have a lot of practice. However, often they are less skilled in making long term predictions because they would have to live multiple lives in order to make the same number of observations that would cause them to acquire the same level of skill. It is also because humans are biased to prefer the human approach - cf. man vs. machine contests like a computer vs Kasparov and ‘organic’ vs commercially grown fruit and ‘all natural’ or ‘no preservatives’ labelling vs. artificial products. [Another example could be the current intensive media coverage of people who die because of self-driving cars even though, statistically, humans make errors much more frequently and kill far larger numbers proportionately; it makes for better news and somehow is more shocking.]
Kahneman designed a test for assessing the aptitude of army inductees and employed Meehl’s principles. Instead of interviewers making a judgement on which soldiers were most suited to combat, they would score relevant personality traits based on largely factual questions but the final fitness would be computed by a standard formula using these scores. As such, the interviewers stopped making predictive judgements and began collecting data, leaving the computation to formula. Apparently, the interviewers were close to mutiny and complained that they had been turned into robots! To prove his point, Kahneman gathered feedback from the units where the soldiers were assigned under both methods of selection. When the old human method was compared it to the formula, the result was ‘completely useless’ (old method, humans) vs. ‘moderately useful’ (new method, formula). However, interestingly, when the interviewers were asked to ‘close their eyes and guess how good a candidate would be on a scale of 1-5’ after conducting the new interview - this ALSO functioned as a good prediction! Intuition did add value but only after disciplined collection of objective information, not when used in and of itself on a stand alone basis. Seems like an appropriate mix works best so while it is good not to totally trust intuition it is also good not totally distrust it. Kahneman ended up giving the ‘close your eyes’ score the same weight as the other 6 scores in his formula.
CHAPTER 22
Not everyone agrees with Kahneman’s focus on biases and heuristics. Gary Klein is an advocate of Natural Decision Making (NDM) and Kahneman and him co-authored a paper to outline the differences in their approaches. Klein’s background was in the study of the ‘intuition’ of fire commanders, who seem to make good crucial decisions without conducting any analysis. However, both Klein and Kahneman agreed that this ‘intuition’ was, in fact, a function of recognition and memory. Just because they don’t know why they know doesn’t mean it is intuition; knowing without knowing why is a ubiquitous feature of much of mental life.
Some ‘intuitions’ are easy to acquire, like being afraid of something bad happening in a place or situation in which it has happened in the past and vice versa for good experiences (Pavlov’s dog). However, learning ‘intuition’ about more complex situations (firefighting, chess etc.) takes longer because these ‘skills’ are in reality made up of many different mini-skills that take longer to learn, or become embedded in associative memory, and can then be recalled.
Klein and Kahneman’s differences may have arisen from the different types of experts that they analysed (nurses, firemen vs. stock pickers, political experts). Both agreed that subjective confidence in judgement is not a good guide to validity and proposed that intuitions that are likely to be skilled (and therefore listened to) arise from situations that are: 1) sufficiently regular to be predictable and 2) come from people who have sufficient time to learn these regularities through prolonged practice. In the case of firefighter, their system 1 has learned valid cues whereas in the case of a stock picker, according to Kahneman, there are no valid clues to learn! Meehl’s clinicians from the previous chapter operated in a low validity environment; indicated by the fact that even though the algorithms outperformed the clinicians, they didn’t do very well either in absolute terms. The conclusion was: Intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.
CHAPTER 23
Kahneman was involved in a project to design a curriculum and textbook for decision making to be taught in Israeli schools. After a year or so, the team members were asked to guess how long it would take them to complete the task and the average guess was around 2 years. However, under closer examination, the curriculum expert in the group, who also guessed around 2 years, revealed that most groups like theirs take 7-10 years, 40% fail and that the current group was worse than average!! By the time the book was finished (8 years) the ministry for education didn’t even use it! Kahneman says this situation shows three lessons: 1) inside view vs. outside view 2) planning fallacy and 3) irrational perseverance
The inside view is a form of WYSIATI, the team had written 2 chapters already and knew roughly how many more had to be written and roughly how long that would take. However, this failed to take account of the fact that the existing chapters may have been the easiest and enthusiasm for the project at that stage was probably at its peak. Alongside this, and far more important, were the ‘unknown unknowns’ of the project such as illness, divorce and bureaucratic delays! In this case, the outside view was the experience of the curriculum expert. This was the equivalent of a base rate and should have formed the basis for their estimates, only adjusting it if there was strong evidence to suggest this was valid. Here, it is clear that people who know information about an individual case rarely feel they need stats about the general class to which that case belongs to make accurate predictions. But they should!! Even when they did learn it they ignored it. Personal impressions are far more persuasive than pallid stats. Often, people may see their case as unique and therefore not subject to the base rate.
The planning fallacy describes forecasts that are too close to best-case scenarios and that could be improved by impartial reference to the statistics about similar cases. The history of cost estimates for the Scottish Parliament is a good example of this! Another good example is, of all the rail projects undertaken worldwide between 1969-1998 - 90% overestimated passenger numbers by an average 106%! Often, the desire to get the plan approved or to go ahead with the project causes over-optimism. Also, people may be aware that a project will continue once started as it is undesirable to leave it half finished and therefore deliberately underestimate its cost. The solution is to use the outside view and use all statistical, distributional information available - i.e. use a base rate calculated using a large database - but this is never a natural inclination! (cf Bent Flyvbjerg - planning guru)
CHAPTER 24
The planning fallacy is an example of the optimistic bias, which is extremely pervasive. Most people view the world as more benign than it is, their own attributes as better than they are and believe their goals to be more achievable than they are. People also exaggerate their ability to predict the future leading to over confidence. Optimists tend to take more risks and be happier people, so may play an outsized role in life vs. pessimists.
Because optimists fail to assess the odds related to projects like their’s, or do not think that they apply to them, they are resilient and persiverent in the face of obstacles.
Interesting study by Malmendier and Tate showed that more optimistic CEOs typically held more stock in their company but still took on excessive risks. [This is contrary to my own theory about stock ownership vs. options.] The same study also found that performance of companies with ‘celebrity CEOs’ (who had received awards and press attention) was poorer once these CEOs had been anointed, which i would tend to agree with.
Part of entrepreneurial overconfidence is WYSIATI, people overwhelmingly believe their fate is in their own hands and neglect to make a proper assessment of the competition called ‘competition neglect’.
A study of CFOs by psychologists at Duke gathered over 11,000 predictions about how the market would perform and found no correlation. They also found that when asked for a confidence interval of 80% (i.e. a figure which would be too high 90% of the time and one that would be too low 90% of the time) about the range in which the market would trade, the CFOs made it 4x too narrow - largely because they did not feel comfortable setting a realistically wide range because they would be laughed at for making such a wide prediction about something they were supposed to be knowledgeable about. Optimism and overconfidence are, wrongly, valued highly by society! Over confident advisors, experts and consultants can expect to be more highly in demand than their more realistic counterparts.
The mixture of emotional, cognitive and social factors that support exaggerated optimism are powerful. For this reason, risk takers rarely have a higher appetite for risk; they simply underestimate the risks and are overly optimistic about the perceived prospects of a project.
According to Martin Seligman, the key to a positive psychology is preservation of self-image so that a disproportionate amount of credit is taken for both successes and failures. When something goes well, it was all because of you, but when it goes badly, it was due to factors outside your control. This strikes me as true and highly observable in most optimists behaviour.
Gary Klein recommends the practice of a ‘premortem’ to tame the optimistic biases of System 1. Before taking important decisions, take 5-10 mins to write a hypothetical explanation of why this decision was a terrible idea 1 year in the future. This practice moves against the positive group think that develops around ideas that are just about to be taken and forces knowledgeable participants to think negatively about an idea they favour.
PART FOUR: CHOICES
CHAPTER 25
Rejects the expected utility view of humans as rational, selfish and unchanging in their tastes. For example, people prefer $46 to a coin toss to win $100 or nothing OR people prefer $80, for sure, to a gamble where 80% of the time you win $100 and 20% $10 even though the EV (expected value) for this ‘bet’ is $82.
Daniel Bernoulli (1738 paper) noted that people dislike risk even if the EV of the riskier option is larger than the amount they would receive as a sure thing. He attributed this to the utility value (he called it ‘moral expectation’) of the outcomes rather than their pure monetary value. A risk taker with diminishing marginal utility for wealth will be risk averse.
Bernoulli used this concept [close to a logarithmic scale, but not quite?] to explain why poorer people buy insurance and richer people sell it; the loss of the same amount of money causes a far larger decrease in the utility for a poorer person than it does a richer one. E.g. loss of 1m for a person worth 10m is 4 pts whereas for a person worth 3m it is 18 pts.
However, while Bernoulli is correct in equating money with its utility rather than its absolute value he misses out the context of how a certain level of wealth has been arrived at. Kahneman’s example is as follows, Jack and Jill have 5m each but yesterday Jack had 9m and Jill had 1m; are both equally happy? Of course not! Another problem with his theories that Kahneman sees is the reference points for a given gamble. In a choice between 2m for sure or equal chances of 1m and 4m Bernoulli would see most people choosing the same option. Kahneman objects because he thinks that a person with 1m already would take the sure thing as they will double their money vs. either stay the same or quadruple it. However, he thinks that a person with 4m would gamble as their choice is a certain loss of half their money or gamble to loss 75% of their wealth or nothing. For the person with only 1m both are OK and the sure thing is better, for the person with 4m both options are bad and the gamble is the better one. Faced with only gains (or neutral outcomes) people are risk averse, whereas faced with only losses people are risk seeking. [Although I agree with the conclusions, I think this example doesn’t make much sense as what kind of gamble requires one person to put in 1m and the other 4m - both for the same outcomes? Nonsensical!]
While I agree that utility theory is flawed because the history of one’s wealth has serious psychological implications I think the second example that Kahneman gives represents a misunderstanding of the nature of gambles or investments.
An interesting aside mentioned in this chapter is the St Petersburg paradox, with a starting stake of $2 a player is offered the chance to toss a coin with the stake doubling every time a head comes up (2,4,8,16 etc) and the game ending when a tail comes up. How much should someone pay for the chance to play this game? Theoretically, the returns are infinite but most people won’t pay much to play the game.
CHAPTER 26
Amos and Kahneman saw that people’s attitudes to gains and losses are not the same even when the same amount is involved and that this nuance wasn’t covered by Bernoulli’s theory. For example, if offered the chance to gain $900 or a 90% chance to win $1000 (the same in terms of EV) most people will choose the sure thing. However, if offered the chance to lose $900 or gamble on a 90% chance of losing $1000 most people will gamble. People like winning and dislike losing and they dislike losing more than they like winning. This was demonstrated by another set of problems:
Receive $1000 and then either gamble on a 50% chance to win another $1000 or get $500 for sure.
Receive $2000 and then either gamble on a 50% chance to LOSE $1000 or LOSE $500 for sure
Most people take the sure thing when presented with a gain and gamble when presented with a loss. Both examples are the same, gain $1500 for sure or gamble and get between 1k and 2k. People don’t adjust their decisions because of the larger amounts involved or the differences it would make to their overall wealth. It is to do with the reference point, how the conundrum is presented and attitudes to winning and losing.
Amos and Kahneman called this ‘Prospect Theory’ and identified three main cognitive features that play a role in financial decision making, all of which are operating characteristics of System 1:
Evaluation relative to a neutral reference point
Diminishing returns (diff between $100 and $200 is much more than 900 and 1000)
Loss aversion - losses loom larger than gains. This may have an evolutionary background as organisms that treat threats as more urgent have a better chance to survive and reproduce.
Loss aversion can be seen from an example where people are asked if they would toss a coin to win or lose $100. Most would not and would require a winning amount between $150-250 to offset the risk of losing $100. In a 50-50 gamble, a win - lose ratio of 1:1 is appropriate but people dislike the loss more than they like the gain so desire an asymmetric payoff to replicate their asymmetric feelings. Equally, this aversion shows that Bernoulli’s theory of pure utility of wealth cannot explain the extreme aversion shown to inconsequential amounts. Matthew Rabin showed that if someone rejects the gamble - 50% chance to lose $100, 50% chance to win $200, which most people do, then they should also reject the gamble 50% chance to lose $200, 50% chance to win $20,000, which is clearly mad. [But does Bernoulli’s theory really advise this, not 100% clear to me??]
Kahneman does recognise the limits of prospect theory too, highlighting its inability to adjust the all important ‘reference point’ when people’s hopes or expectations have been raised by the high probability of an outcome. It cannot deal with disappointment. Equally, it cannot deal with the regret of choosing one option over another.
CHAPTER 27 THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT
Kahneman goes on to argue that the reference point, or situation, have profound implications for another central model of economic theory - the standard model of indifference curves. Both these, and Bernoulli’s representation of outcomes as states of wealth, make the erroneous assumption that the utility for a state of affairs depends only on that state and is not affected by your personal circumstances and history. Things that might once have been assessed as equally valuable (extra salary vs. extra vacation) soon come to be seen as losses when a status quo has been established.
Richard Thaler, a doyenne of behavioral economics, used to wonder why his standard economic theory professors taught rational economic behaviour but behaved irrationally. For example, one professor collected wine and would never pay more than $35 for a bottle but was unwilling to sell them even for $100 making a mockery of the theory that the bottle had a single price below which he would buy and above which he would sell. This is known as the endowment effect; the professor was unwilling to sell the wine as he would have felt a loss of utility from its sale. Here, when objects are held to be enjoyed by the owner they are much more reluctant to sell them even at a price far higher than they would buy them. Another example is a football fan with a ticket for a big game, if the person finds out that tickets are trading hands for hundreds or thousands of dollars they probably still won’t sell them even though they would never buy them at that price themselves.
An experiment conducted by Amos and Kahneman modified an experiment conducted by Vernon Smith. In Smith’s experiment, participants were given tokens and each person told a different cash amount that these could be traded for at the end of the experiment. The participants then traded tokens and, as standard theory predicts, the tokens ended up in the hands of the people to whom they were worth the most. Amos and Kahneman adapted this by giving some participants a useful object that they could be expected to use; an attractive coffee mug. Some participants received mugs (sellers), others did not (buyers). Buyers had to use their own money to acquire the mug. The value of the mug was about $6 but when trading commenced the sellers want c.$7 and the buyers would only pay just under $3 - almost exactly the ratio by which gain must outweigh loss (2:1) in the coin toss example designed to demonstrate the principle of loss aversion. Apparently, the gap was not as large in the UK when the experiment was conducted there. Kahneman also mentions another variant where a third group, choosers, can choose to receive a mug or an amount of money they think equivalent. This group chose a value just above $3. Kahneman says they face the same choice as the buyers but, as I have understood it, buyers must buy with their own cash whereas choosers are going to end up with something from someone else either way? I don’t think either of these examples are much good - especially the choosers one, which I found confusing. However, they do indicate the endowment principle; that it is hard to sell something you own and intend to use. Apparently, this stimulates parts of the brain associated with disgust and pain, which can also be the case for buying if you feel like you are getting ripped off, buying at an attractive price stimulates parts of the brain related to pleasure. The reluctance babies have to give up a toy demonstrates how the endowment effect is part of our System 1. Another experiment (Jack Knetsch), which is clearer, involves participants filling out a form with a reward in front of them. This reward was an expensive pen in one example and a bar of Swiss chocolate in another. Asked at the end of the form if they would like to swap gifts for the other one, only 10% agreed to swap. Knetsch also tested a variant where people did not actually possess the object before they were offered a trade and this increased trading. The same experiment was conducted at a baseball card trading convention and inexperienced traders (18%) were much more reluctant to trade than experienced ones (48%), which may show that the effect diminishes with experience or that the experienced traders will trade come what may!!
A study of the luxury housing market in Boston during the downturn of 2008-9 showed that those who had paid higher prices for their, identical, units, spent longer selling their homes and eventually received more money for them; displaying some degree of anchoring or endowment effect.
People experiencing poverty do not display the endowment effect because they are always short of the money they need for their expenditures or, in the language of prospect theory, are living below their reference point (the money they need for all their necessities). As such, small amounts of money received are seen as a reduced loss and not as a gain. So it seems like in a case of extreme need for money people living in poverty don’t display the same attachment to what they already have.
CHAPTER 28
Threats are processed faster than opportunities by our System 1 brains. One experiment flashed pictures of another person’s eyes for 2/100th of a second, far too quickly to be processed by vision, while they sat in a brain scanner. When the eyes are smiling or happy nothing happens but when they look terrified or threatened their is a huge reaction in the participant's amygdala - the brain’s threat centre. Equally, some experiments report that angry faces ‘pop’ out of a crowd of happy faces while a single happy face in a crowd of angry ones won’t. A single cockroach in a bowl of cherries spoils its appeal but a single cherry in a bowl of cockroaches does nothing! It seems, for evolutionary purposes, our brains give priority to bad news and can process it extremely rapidly. Of course, opportunities to mate or feed can also be recognised very quickly but not, apparently, with the same speed as threats. This difference in speed of processing also includes words associated with bad outcomes and statements with which a person strongly disagrees.
Michel Cabanac sees most pleasure as functioning to indicate the direction of a biologically significant improvement in circumstances.
Reference points, whether they are the status quo or targets set for the future, involve loss aversion too. For example, taxi drivers may have a target earnings for the year and may break this down into a daily target. On a rainy day, this target will be easy to attain whereas on a day with good weather it will be harder. Logically, taxi drivers should work as much as possible on a rainy day and take time off when it is nice as this time off ‘costs’ them less per hour. However, because of loss aversion, drivers will usually go home early once they have made their target on a rainy day and work longer hours on less profitable days. Equally, in professional golf each hole has a reference point, par. Two economists studied over 2.5m putts and determined that players were 3.6% better at putting for par than for birdie! This difference would have equated to about 1 stroke per round!
The asymmetric intensity experienced in losses vs. gains makes lots of negotiations very difficult. This can be reduced if the negotiations concern a growing market rather than a shrinking one because allocating losses is prob 2x as painful as allocating gains. In the animal kingdom, the owner usually wins territorial battles demonstrating, perhaps, both the endowment effect and loss aversion! Equally, in institutions, losers from reform will usually be far more active than winners because they feel the losses more keenly. Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force across animals, individuals and institutions that favours minimal changes to the status quo.
Loss aversion and reference points also seem to have an impact on what is deemed fair. Businesses that increased prices on items when they were in high demand were almost universally branded as unfair. So were profitable companies that reduced existing workers salaries when there was a fall in wages in the labour market where that company operated. In both cases, the businesses broke informal contracts with customers or employees judged by reference points (price prior to demand spike or previous wage). Interestingly, if a company sacked the old employee and hired a new one at a reduced wage this wasn’t deemed unfair. Nor was it deemed unfair for a company to share losses with either its customers (by increasing price) or employees (by reducing wages). Furthermore, a company benefiting from a windfall profit because of a fall in manufacturing prices wasn’t deemed unfair either although a company was deemed more fair if it shared these profits with other stakeholders. Seemingly, it is considered OK for businesses to share losses but unfair for a company to exploit its power to increase profits by burdening clients or customers with losses relative to their reference points. The perception of unfairness has also been proven to be detrimental to businesses in the L/T as employees are less productive and clients will try to buy things elsewhere. Even people who have no existing business with the company perceived to be unfair will often join in the punishment by deliberately avoiding patronising the business in future. MRI scans reveal that altruistic punishment of this nature is rewarding but our brains are not designed to reward generosity as consistently as they are to punish meanness - another asymmetry in the psychological treatment of losses vs. gains The reward associated with punishing a stranger who was mean to another stranger may be the glue that holds society together! [Righteous indignation!!]
In the law, the familiar rule that possession is 9/10th of the law indicates the moral primacy of the reference point and also seems to confirm endowment effect to a certain extent. Equally, when goods are lost in transit the owner is compensated for the loss but not, usually, for the profit they may have lost on selling or using these good for their final purpose.
CHAPTER 29
When making assessments of complex decisions multiple factors are considered and given different weights. Ordinarily, this is a function of our System 1.
The possibility effect and certainty effect describe how we overweight small risks because they have very bad outcomes. We are willing to pay much more than EV to eliminate them these small risks (certainty, insurance). Equally, the difference between certain disaster and a 95% chance of disaster seems very large (possibility, gambling). In both cases, small probabilities are overweighted relative to their EV. This goes against the expectation principle and rational choice, which states that the utility of a gamble is the average of the utilities of its outcomes, each weighted by its probabilities.
Another example of this abrogation of rational choice is the Allais Paradox (1952):
Would you prefer 61% chance of $520k or a 63% chance of $500k?
Would you prefer a 98% of $520k or an 100% of $500k?
Most people will choose the first option in 1), because of possibility effect, and the second in 2), because of the certainty effect, but in rational terms the EVs are as follows:
317.2K or 315k - so people SHOULD choose the second
509.6k or 500k - so people SHOULD choose the first
This does not chime with most people’s choices nor the choices of leading rational choice (aka The American School) experts at the conference where Allais presented it!!
Amos and Kahneman conducted studies into decision weights vs actual probabilities and found that both the possibility effect (overweighting small chances) and the certainty effect (underweighting large probabilities, or conversely, overweighting the small prob of their non-occurrence) were both strongly in evidence:
They also found that the certainty effect was more powerful than the possibility effect if the outcome in question was negative. People also tend to treat very small risks, or very high probabilities, as the same even when there is considerable difference between the two. For example, a cancer risk rate of 0.001% is much the same as 0.00001% to most people although in a population of the US one would cause 3,000 cancers and the other 30. Amos and Kahneman summarised their findings in The Fourfold Pattern:
The top left is as Bernoulli described - risk averse to large gains. The bottom left is best exemplified by the popularity of lotteries. The bottom right is best exemplified by the purchase of insurance. The top right was where A&K found something new - when faced with a choice between a sure loss and the high probability of a larger one diminishing sensitivity makes the sure loss more aversive and the certainty effect makes the gamble more attractive than the actual probability; the exact opposite of favourable outcomes. When faced with a large loss, people will take huge, irresponsible gambles because the loss is too painful and the slim chance of relief too enticing [cf. gambling losses!! And poss doubling down on stocks on which you’ve already lost??]
In individual cases, it is easy to empathise with hopes and fears that drive irrational behaviour. However, in the long term the failures to accept the true odds, or deviations from EV, are costly.
[I should try to create an equivalent of the fourfold model for long only stock investment - what are the equivalent situations and behaviours?]
CHAPTER 30
Just as buying a lottery ticket causes, or displays, overestimation of an unlikely, pleasant event so terrorism is effective because it causes the same overestimation of a horrible event, such as suicide bombers. Kahneman uses the example of suicide bombers in buses in Israel. Even though people know that being the victim of a suicide bomber, or even to be affected by one indirectly, is highly unlikely the vividness, fluency and attention that such gruesome events provoke make them prime fodder for System 1 and create an availability cascade.
People generally overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events and overweight these events in their decisions. Craig Fox showed this, and also a tendency to be overly optimistic about what a person is being asked to think about, in an experiment where participants were asked to assess the % probability of a playoff team winning the NBA. The sum of the average estimates was 240%! When asked to bet on the same tournament, the average amount wagered was $287 even though the maximum pay out for any one team was $160 thus guaranteeing a loss of $127.
While prospect theory differs from utility theory insofar as it does not equate decision weights with probability, it still maintains that the decision weight will be the same for events of the same probability. This turns out to be untrue. People have an even lower sensitivity to probability concerning emotional outcomes vs. monetary ones. People are much better at assessing the appropriate decision weights for cash bets vs. receiving roses. However, this is not entirely down to the emotive nature of the example, according to Kahneman, much of it is to do with the vividness of the image and the fluency that this allows System 1 to construct a plausible and coherent story. As such, vivid outcomes are poorly judged even when they contain monetary information as well because of the power of cognitive ease.
An effect called ‘denominator neglect’ seems to confirm this insofar as, in experiments, 30-40% of people choose option B when confronted with the prospect of attempting to draw a ‘winning’ red marble from the following bowls:
10 marbles, 1 red
100 marbles, 8 red
Perhaps because the larger number of marbles conjures up a more vivid image in System 1 causing people to ignore the fairly simple probability calculation that would yield the correct choice. Equally, when risks are described in terms of, ‘one person per 100,000 will die’ it is far more vivid, and leads to more dramatic overweighting, vs. ‘the risk of death is 0.0001%’. System 1 is far better at dealing with individuals than it is abstract categories. Other examples include, a disease that kills 1,286 / 10k being judged as more dangerous than one that kills 24.14% of the population or one that kills 24.4/100! Frequency formulations are FAR more evocative than ratios.
If people have experience of a probability rather than just having it described to them - e.g. being allowed to press the buttons themselves rather than being told in an experiment ‘one button pays $10, 5% of the time the other $1, 50% of the time’ - then estimation is much more accurate and overweighting far less common. As such, when System 1 is allowed to develop an idea of what is ‘normal’ or to form a view as to the ‘character’ of each button then it works better. When dealing with examples that draw attention to unlikely events like descriptions of probabilities, very vivid images, concrete representations or explicit reminders then the mind will usually overweight them because System 1 has a chance to create a narrative in which the event becomes ‘real’ in the mind. Or at least more likely than in purely statistical terms. However, if the mind is not asked about a specific risk and has not experienced it either then it will tend to neglect it entirely.
CHAPTER 31
[Is there a mistake in the first set of answers to the first problem? Seems like option D should have an EV of $750 to me (0.75 x $1000 + 0.25 x $0 = $750) not $760 as stated.]
When faced with groups of questions that must be answered together, the answers can be framed narrowly (i.e. individually, one after another) or broadly (i.e. wholistically, taken together). Humans are, by nature, narrow framers and prefer to make decisions as they arise even when asked to consider their responses jointly.
This preference for narrow framing may cause a loss averse person to reject a coin toss gamble even when they stands to lose $100 for heads and win $200 for tails because they feel the loss twice as much as the gain - i.e. the EV is $0 with doubled losses rather than $50 without taking account of the loss aversion. However, Kahneman advises that loss averse people should still take this gamble because, if they take a number of small gambles like this, even when losses are doubled the EV is still positive when calculated over multiple bets with the same odds and payouts. This is an example of broad framing; the individual bet may have a neutral EV to a loss averse person and therefore not be worth taken but if it is viewed in the context of the opportunity to make many such bets then it is still advantageous even for a person who feels losses twice as keenly as gains. Broad framing, or viewing bets as part of a portfolio, decrease the emotional reaction to losses and increase willingness to take risks. [I feel like this is BROADLY true but Kahneman is a little slippery here in his example because he ONLY doubles the losses when all the bets are lost, combinations that involve one loss and one win retain the original value of the loss, not the doubled one, but surely a loss averse person would feel any loss as double not just multiple ones?? I could redo the table on p337 and see what results. On the other hand, you could argue if someone wins one toss and loses one then they haven’t actually got any OVERALL losses to feel twice as keenly!]
[This has applications for investment performance - it should be checked infrequently and on an aggegrate basis.]
CHAPTER 32
With the exception of the very poor, most people’s desire for more money is not necessarily economic. It is more a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. As such, people often refuse to cut losses as it is seen as a form of failure, are biased against actions that may lead to regret and draw an illusory distinction between omission (not doing) and commission (doing) because the later seems to carry far greater responsibility.
Lots of people keep mental accounts for different areas of their lives or different activities they require money for - housekeeping, retirement saving, children’s education saving, medical emergencies, war etc. etc. Whether people see these various accounts as a ‘success’ or a ‘failure’ is largely a function of System 1. The same is true of the stocks that make up investment portfolios. If a person needs cash they are far more likely to sell a winner than a loser because the former makes them feel good about their investment prowess and the themselves whereas the latter does the opposite. This is called the disposition effect and is a form of narrow framing. If the portfolio is looked at as a whole, the stock to be sold should be sold on its future prospects alone; the purchase price SHOULD be irrelevant. However, when framed narrowly, every stock has its own mental account and should be closed at a profit according to System 1; even if the person’s System 2 knows this is impossible!
The fact that losses are tax deductible means that this narrow, mental accounting is reversed in the month before tax returns are filed but in the other 11 months people routinely sell more winners because it is pleasurable. Experienced investors are less prone to this mistake than inexperienced ones.
Often, investors will put more money into a losing position (doubling down) because it makes them feel better (much cheaper, lowers average purchase price), this is known as the sunk cost fallacy. It can also apply to projects and businesses both at the individual and corporate level. As in figure 13 from chp 29, this is a choice between a sure loss and an unfavourable gamble and often the unfavourable gamble is chosen. Equally, as most projects / investments have individual originators often a CEO / investor will be more inclined to put more money into a floundering endeavour as it may save their reputation; whereas admitting defeat and taking on a new project / investment, usually someone else’s idea, will consign them to permanent failure. In this way, mental accounts and sunk costs prevent people from correctly evaluating current opportunities.
Regret and blame are emotions which are experienced far more keenly when they arise from a deviation from what is considered the default option in a given situation. As such, a person who sells a stock and buys another but would have made more by not selling feels much more regret than someone who doesn’t sell but would have made more by switching. Commission hurts > omission hurts. Equally, participants in an experiment who played a simulation of blackjack showed more regret if they answered ‘yes’ regardless of whether they were asked ‘do you want to hit?’ or ‘do you want to stand?’ indicating a default of, ‘i don’t have a strong wish to do it’ as a response to both [surely this would be different depending on what cards the player had? 10 vs. 20 for example!!]. In another example, consumers who were reminded that they might feel regret about their purchases showed a preference for brand names. Fund managers indulge in ‘window dressing’ of their portfolios to remove losers and buy more of the stocks they hold that have been performing well; albeit at higher prices. All are motivated by regret or fear of blame.
Richard Thaler has an example in which participants are asked how much they would pay to be vaccinated for a disease they have a 1/1000 of having; the vaccine can only be taken before the symptoms are displayed. He also asked how much people would have to be paid to expose themselves to a 1/1000 chance of contracting the disease without the possibility of being vaccinated at any time. Apparently, people want to be paid 50x what they would pay for the vaccine! This is because 1) it is not legitimate to sell one’s health, in general and 2) in the second example people who expose themselves to the disease have deviated from the default option of doing nothing. Equally, parents considering insecticide for their children were prepared to pay a premium for safer alternatives but not prepared to purchase a more dangerous alternative for a discount. The idea of trading their child’s safety for money is a ‘taboo trade off’ even though, logically speaking, the risk may be small and the money saved could be redeployed in protecting their children from more probable, and therefore dangerous, risks. In a legal setting, the precautionary principle place the entire burden of responsibility on anyone who does anything that may harm another person or the environment. Clearly, this principle is costly to innovation and may even be paralysing. It’s strict application would have prevented innovations including - aeroplanes, AC, antibiotics, cars, vaccines and X ray to name a few, which have all contributed more to society as a whole vs. the risks they posed in the early stages of their innovation. Enhanced loss aversion in a moral context is a strong and salient feature of our behaviour that has its origins in System 1. The balance between this intuition and efficient risk management is complex and does not have a simple solution.
Avoidance of regret and self administered punishments like blame play a large, and sometimes irrationally costly, part in our lives. Considering the possibility of bad outcomes can help to mitigate the pain of regret when bad outcomes do occur as it reduces the power of the hindsight bias, which makes you feel like it was easy to make a better choice all along and that you are stupid for making the choice you did. The psychologist Daniel Gilbert claims that actual regret is usually less bad than the anticipation of it so advises people not to overweight it in their decisions because, even if it does happen, it will hurt less than we think.
CHAPTER 33
Single and joint evaluations can yield very different outcomes. When asked to consider $ amounts of compensation for a man who lost his right arm in a robbery while he was buying something in a shop participants didn’t give different amounts depending on if he was shopping in a shop he visits regularly vs. one he hardly ever visits. However, when told about the two incidences separately, excluding the possibility of joint evaluation, participants gave a far higher figure when the man was injured in a shop he hardly ever visits because of the increased poignancy of the scenario. This triggers a System 1 response whereas when asked to compare the two situations people engage System 2 and override this, broadly irrelevant, emotional response. Joint evaluation almost always involves more careful and effortful consideration, meaning System 2 is involved far more than System 1. Single evaluation is far more heavily influenced by System 1. This is called preference reversal.
Another example (Lichtenstein & Slovic) involves two bets [which have roughly equal EV as far as I can see]:
11/36 to win $160, 25/36 chance to lose $15 [EV $38.47]
35/36 to win $40, 1/36 chance to lose $10 [EV $38.61]
Respondents choose B over A consistently but when asked the minimum price they would sell each bet for if they owned it people then choose A as higher value than B!!
Most of us split the world into different categories and are familiar with the norms that are applicable to those categories. As such, things that make sense to our mind ‘within category’ may no longer do so when evaluated jointly ‘between categories’. The examples given were two emails asking for donation:
For safe breeding areas for dolphins suffering from pollution
For regular skin cancer check ups for farmworkers spending long hours in the sun
When asked individually, the dolphins attracted higher $ donations on average but when considered jointly, thus introducing a humans vs animals comparison, contributions to farmworkers were higher. It all depends on the mental context that we, unwittingly, use to frame the question, which in turn effects the substitution of harder questions for easier ones (e.g. replace ‘what is the $ value of a dolphin?’ for ‘is the environment a good cause?’, ‘how much do i like dolphins?’ and ‘How much do i usually give to charities?’) and intensity matching based on the answers to those easier questions.
Joint evaluations may differ from single ones because of the ‘evaluability hypothesis’ whereby attributes (e.g. number of entries in a dictionary, Hsee) may only be comparable in joint evaluation.
There is evidence that reversals also play a part in the administration of justice. People are faced with complex, difficult to answer questions that they do not know the answer to. As such, they might be better approached in a broader context of joint evaluation. However, this is not allowed within the law so all are judged as single evaluations, which seems counterintuitive and bad. However, the context is so key to joint evaluations it is also important that other cases chosen for joint evaluation do not exert an overwhelming bias. Also, while the scale of severity of punishments is often consistent within the category they seem to be out of kilter with other categories. For example, the highest fine in the US for regulations regarding worker safety is $7k whereas a violations of the Wild Birds Conservation Act can result in a fine of up to $25k! As such, penalties may be consistent within agencies but incoherent globally.
CHAPTER 34
P363-4 are very good in meaning and emotional framing. Even though two statements may have the same meaning the words they use and the contexts they evoke in our System 1 mind make them very different propositions emotionally. People will more readily forgo a discount than pay a charge.
There is neuroscientific and experimental evidence to suggest the way facts, stats or choices are framed plays a large part in what they ‘mean’ to our brain, how they will be processed and what decisions they are more or less likely to prompt. However, some people are less susceptible to framing than others.
A&K designed an experiment where participants were asked to choose between two options for defending a population against an outbreak of a foreign disease expected to kill 600 people:
200 people will be saved
1/3 rd prob 600 will be saved, 2/3rds prob 0 will be saved
Most respondents choose 1. But if reframed:
400 people will die
1/3rd prob nobody will die, 2/3rds prob 600 will die
Most respondents choose 2. Preferences between the same objective outcomes reverse with different formulations. The powerful effects of framing pertain even when public health professionals are asked the same questions, demonstrating the considerable influence of framing. Our preferences are about framed problems and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance.
Another example used is taken from Thomas Schelling’s Choice and Consequence - if a tax code uses a family with 2 children as the norm, allowing a discount for 2 or more children but effectively charging a surcharge for those with less than 2 then:
Should the exemption be larger for rich people?
Should the surcharge for poor be as large as the rich?
The answer to both of these questions is ordinarily ‘no’ but it is not logically possible to want the poor to receive the same (or greater) benefits than the rich AND simultaneously want them to pay less of a penalty for being childless. [not sure I follow here]
Equally, when asked to choose who will save more petrol if both drive the same number of miles:
Stu switching from a 12mpg car to a 14mpg car
Gor switching from a 30mpg car to a 40mpg one
Most people choose 2 even though it is actually 1 because the mpg frame is ‘wrong’ (unhelpful and counter to reality). It is easier to work out on a ‘gallons per mile’ or ‘gallons per 100 miles’ basis.
Another example of starkly different responses to the same questions comes from organ donation rates in Europe. License holders must either opt in (i.e. check a box, Germany - 12%, Denmark - 4%) or opt out (i.e. not check a box, Sweden - 86%, Austria - 100%). The fact that such a significant societal benefit is dictated by something as simple as how the question is asked is both worrisome and embarrassing.
PART FIVE: TWO SELVES
CHAPTER 35
Our experience of painful situations and are memories of them are often different. When remembering an experience, people will rate it retrospectively as the average of the worst part of their experience and the level of pain they were experiencing when the incident stopped (Worst pain + end pain/2= remembered pain). This is called the peak-end rule. People will also not show any difference in average ratings of total pain even when the duration is much different, meaning a person who experiences 10 mins of pain reports it as the same as a person who experienced 5. It’s called ‘duration neglect’. Because of these two factors people will choose to experience more pain (on a sum basis) because they remember it as less painful. For example:
20 mins, peak pain - 8, end pain 1 (p-e = 4.5)
10 mins, peak pain - 8, end pain 7 (p-e = 7.5)
Objectively, no one would choose 1 because it will undoubtedly involve more pain when measured as a sum total. However, the peak-end rule dictates that this will not be how the incident is remembered. The System 1 mind has a preference of norms, averages and prototypes so records some representative moments as memory rather than summing the total of every moment as it was experienced, which is probably impossible for any length of time. Studies in rats using pleasurable stimuli has also shown that duration is widely ignored while intensity is better remembered.
Also mentions the ‘cold hand’ study where subjects are asked to put their hands in a bowl of painfully, but not intolerably, cold water for 60 secs and then told to remove it. They were then asked to do a second experiment where they put it in for 60 secs and keep it there while slightly warmer water is released into the bowl making the temperature rise a degree for an additional 30 secs. When asked, having completed both experiments, which they prefered to repeat 80% said the 90 sec test even though, objectively, it can only be worse than the 60 sec test as it includes the entirety of the that test and only adds to its overall unpleasantness. It does, however, conform to the ‘peak-end’ rule as the end pain is lower.
We think we care about the duration of experiences but our System 1 memory seems to record them based on intensity and how we felt at the end. As such, we seem to have a memory that doesn’t discriminate duration much even though, if asked, we would all say duration matters a great deal.
CHAPTER 36
The remembering self composes stories and keeps them for future reference. We are interested in other people’s stories as shown by the news, history and even imaginary ones novels. We are sad for a man who thought his wife loved him when he dies and it turns out she had a lover for many years and only stayed with him for his money. His life was happy but we are sad about the story. We may take this approach to evaluating entire lives as well, giving far too much weight to the end, as we do in many other areas. One experiment showed participants to judge a 30 or 60 year life of happiness to be worse than the exact same life followed by 5 slightly less enjoyable years, which surely no one would choose if asked for themselves!
We also like to tell ourselves stories and create stored memories. Many people take vacations for this reason and will be, hypothetically, willing to pay far less for holidays they will not be able to remember vs. ones they will. Indeed, some people say they would not go at all indicating a complete dominance of the remembering self over the experiencing self. Would people feel the same about undergoing a painful experience and then forgetting it? Kahneman thinks so but I would be amazed even though it is, in some senses, true to say that we ARE our remembering selves and not the experiencing one - if it makes any sense to divide them!
CHAPTER 37
In an attempt to collect data about the unremembered experiencing self, Kahneman set up phone reminders that then ask people to score their experience or the strength of current emotions. Another method involved asking people to recall their day in detail called Daily Reconstruction Method (DRM). A U-index scores how much people enjoy a given activity - a score of 100% is bad and indicates that 100% of the time people spend doing this activity they are more unhappy than happy emotionally. In large scale studies, it was found a small number of people do the vast majority of being in distress [90:10 rule?] for a large variety of different reasons. A study of 100 mid-western US women discovered the following U-scores:
Morning commute 29%
Work 27%
Child care 24%
Housework 18%
Socialising 12%
TV watching 12%
Sex 5%
U-scores were 6 percentage points higher on weekdays. It also found that being with one’s children doesn’t rank very highly in terms of enjoyment. These studies indicated that the easiest way to have an impact on your own happiness was to control your time as much as possible so you spend more time doing the things you enjoy.
Using this sort of data (experienced) vs. declared evaluations of happiness (remembered), better educated people tended to higher evaluations of their own lives but not greater experienced well-being. Ill health has a severe effect on experienced well-being than on life evaluation. Being poor makes people less happy and amplifies the effects of being ill and other adverse experiences such as divorce and loneliness. The very poor also do not experience the weekend boost in well-being as much as other people. A household income of $75k proved to be the satiation level beyond which more money did not really increase experienced well-being, which may suggest that higher income comes with a reduced ability to enjoy life’s small pleasures having spent lots of money on grander ones! Higher income did, however, provide higher reported satisfaction well beyond the point at which it ceases to have any positive effect on experience.
CHAPTER 38
When people are asked to evaluate the total happiness of their lives they are overwhelmed and will substitute this large, complex question for more simple ones like their mood or a small sample of highly available ideas, not by careful weighing of the domains of your life.
The following graph shows levels of life satisfaction around the time of marriage:
Contrary to the initial impression, marriage does not make you much happier and then sadder as you adapt to the changes of married life and the novelty wears off. Kahneman thinks that heuristics are at work. People can’t really easily evaluate how happy they have been or are and so make reference to recent and vivid memories that spring to mind. For people who are getting married or have recently been married this will usually involve thinking about their happy recent, or prospective, marriage! DRM studies reveal that married life is comparable with single life in terms of experienced happiness, showing that marriage is neither better, nor worse, than single life as it changes some aspects for the better and some for the worse.
Another reason for the low correlations between individuals’ circumstances and their satisfaction with life is that both how life is experienced and how it is evaluated are subject to the genetics of temperament. People who state that a high income is important to them as teenageers will go on to be more satisfied with their life than average if they achieve that goal and significantly less satisfied with their life if they do not achieve it. The difference in life satisfaction (measured on a 5 point scale) between people earning >$200k and those earning <$50k was 0.57 for people who has stated a high income as important at 18 years old vs. 0.12 for people who did not rate income as such an important factor. The goals we set for ourselves as young people are key in determining our evaluation of happiness with our lives.
The Focusing Illusion is a form of WYSIATI. What we focus on will disproportionately determine our beliefs about our overall happiness. People who experience extremely pleasurable or displeasurable experiences will be affected by them abnormally in the short term, but will adapt to them in the longer term. So, when asked to think about the happiness of Californians people, including Californians, will think about the weather and other prototypical and highly available aspects of Californian life before judging them to be happier than average. However, they are not any happier and the climate makes almost no difference to their reported well being, unless they are asked to focus on it vs. a highly available contrasting alternative. In the same way, most people judge victims of crippling accidents to be less happy than most, which is true in the short term, but in the longer term it is not true at all because it becomes the experience of normality for that person. Adaptation to a new situation, good or bad, consists largely of thinking about the incident (marriage, accident) less and less often. The exceptions to this rule of adaptation appear to be chronic pain, exposure to loud noise and depression.
The remembering self seems to be especially susceptible to the focussing illusion. Colostomy patients are shown to be no more or less happy than the healthy population in terms of experienced happiness. However, patients would be willing to trade away years of their life for a shorter life without a colostomy. Furthermore, patients whose colostomy had been reversed were prepared to give up even more years of their remaining life not to have it return. Both seem to indicate that the remembering self is unwilling to consent to states of being that the experiencing self deals with quite comfortably. This may be because of the focussing illusion, which creates a bias of attention towards events that are initially exciting. Because buying a new car is usually exciting it retains attention value because of the intensity of this feeling, not the amount of time this feeling will last because this will fade quickly, and because of this it is appreciated more than other activities that retain their attention value over a long time like learning a language or a musical instrument. Again, time is neglected.
The focussing illusion involves attention to certain moments and neglect of what happens at other times. The mind likes and remembers stories but is not well equipped to processing time.
Thursday, 17 May 2018
Monday, 14 May 2018
Thomas Mann - Magic Mountain
It’s taken me a while to start writing about this book but that’s not for want of material to write about. Quite the opposite. This book contains so much it’s a bit overwhelming. It may be my abject ignorance about the First World War that contributes to this feeling. The book ends with Hans Castrop’s participation in the war and much of the book could be an allegory for the circumstances surrounding it. The character of Settembrini, especially in his debates with Naptha, seems to comment on the European political climate quite extensively. The symbolic quality of Settembrini is explicitly mentioned in the book when Castorp says to him drunkenly at Mardi Gras, “You’re not just anybody, a face with a name, you’re a representative of something, Herr Settembrini, a representative here and now and at my side - that’s what you are!” (p391)
I definitely had the sense that I was missing quite a lot in this symbolic or allegorical sense. Without knowing how much I am missing, it also seemed to me that the book contained so much more than this. I should also mention that I resisted the urge to read secondary interpretations of the allegorical nature of the book so as to keep my own impressions and reactions as authentic as possible. I feel it would be very easy to read a coherent explanation of such a complex book and suddenly come to adopt these suggestions wholesale. Given how famous the book is, I’m sure such explanations are abundant.
The book starts off impressively, proceeding at an agreeable pace with intricate, but not verbose or boring, detail of description. The books ‘hero’, Castrop, journeys up to a mountain sanatorium in Switzerland where his cousin, Joachim, is attempting to recover from pneumonia before joining the army. Interwoven into the narrative of his journey and reunion with his cousin is Castrop’s brief, but illuminating, personal history, which is detailed but not lengthy. The intimacy between the two is well drawn and the ease with which they settle into renewing their acquaintance in the alps helped me settle into the lengthy book as a reader. This feeling of tranquility was soon disrupted by the atmosphere of the sanatorium, which is creepy and surreal.
Both the doctors at the sanatorium, Director Behrens and his assistant Krokowski, the psychoanalyst, have an unsettling quality. My suspicions were immediately raised, perhaps wrongly, by the fact that everyone seems to have to stay at there for an indefinite period of time. This could be explained by the difficult nature of the diseases being treated there but I felt there were some hints that there might be a more commercial motivation behind the director’s continual extensions of the patients’ sentences. Later on, it becomes clear that the patients may actually be the motivating force behind the extension of their stays but I’ll discuss that more when I write about Castorp’s character in more detail. Hans seems remarkably sanguine about the seeming deterioration in his own health soon after he arrives. He feels faint, coughs up blood and can barely complete a innocuous walk. Initially I had the idea that Hans was being drugged by the doctors, perhaps via the beer he asks for after his meal. His pumping heart, bloodshot eyes and flushed complexion could be put down to the altitude. However, his sleepiness and inability to remember details such as his own age, struck me as suspicious. He also seems remarkably relaxed about coughing up blood on the second day. I wondered if pneumonia was infectious, which it isn’t really I discovered!
Hans’ purchase of a thermometer from the nurse during her rounds and his commencement of taking his temperature four times a day and charting the results like the other patients is another odd development. Again, I initially saw this pointing towards a ploy by the sanatorium to keep him there; perhaps by giving him a faulty thermometer. Later on, I began to see it as more of an attempt to stay by Hans himself especially given that most of the time his temperature is barely above the normal range. This is even commented on in the book itself, where reference is made to Hans’, “chronically slightly raised temperature” (p460). Indeed, once Hans has been at the sanatorium for an extremely long time he no longer receives even the pretense of medical attention and the previous activities are referred to as ‘medical diversions’ (p840). The buying of blankets to use on his balcony and his adoption of the numerous ‘rest cures’ may be other signs that Hans is being sucked into this disconcerting world of the ill and contribute to the creepy, unnerving atmosphere.
Eventually, and somewhat inevitably I felt, Hans becomes a patient. Joachim and Settembrini, who have been sceptics about the fact that everyone has to stay so long, try to warn Hans off extending his stay. Indeed, Joachim argues with Hans that he recovered from illness ‘down below’ without any problems so should go back. Hans, who is quite biddable in other passages, surprisingly rejects both his friends and chooses to stay. I’m also surprised that he isn’t more suspicious that he’s not the only one that has come up healthy and then turned sick; the Mexican woman’s second son being the other. The feeling that the sanatorium is something of a quack institution returned when Joachim tells Behrens that he won’t stay any longer and will leave, having stayed 6-9 months already. Behrens reacts angrily and tells Hans that he is free to go too without even examining him. The whole incident is strange and is explained by the narrator, and Hans, as a fit of rage on Behrens’ part. This is could have been brought on by Joachim’s refusal to take his advice or perhaps for unrevealed private reasons. In either case, Joachim does indeed leave but Hans remains. As Hans’ stay becomes ever longer, his cousin James Tiepennel comes to ‘reclaim’ Hans to the ‘flat lands’. This visit is also highly unusual and suspicious. The encounter follows exactly the same path as Hans own arrival when he comes to visit Joachim down to minute details - the train, the blanket, the restaurant, the uneasy impression Hans makes, the inane laughter of the resident and debilitating fatigue of the visitor at supper, the chance meeting with Dr Krokowski and the identical diagnosis by Behrens at breakfast (even including the pulling down of one eye!) - it reminded me of the circular description of the seasons. But here the cycle is broken because cousin Tiepennel realises that the life of the sanatorium will take a hold of him and escapes without even saying goodbye to Hans. I felt, surely, Hans should be somewhat perturbed and, perhaps, should feel like he has been the subject of some kind of fraud when he sees that his healthy cousin is diagnosed exactly like he was when he arrived. However, for whatever reason, it seems Hans is too deeply inculcated in the society of the sanatorium and, perhaps more importantly, has acquired status and placed meaning in it, as he desired to do all along. At this stage, I had the strong impression that he had been brainwashed in one form or another; either by the doctors, the environment,his own psychology or a combination of all three.
The sanatorium is probably most disconcerting during the period of seances and supernatural occurrences that take place after the arrival of Elly. A great number of the patients are involved in these attempts to make contact with the world of the dead, which seems strange. The author seems critical of Dr Krokowski for superintending such efforts and this is in keeping with the wary comments he makes about his lectures and practice of psychoanalysis. Hans, however, does end up attending psychoanalysis in spite of his own reservations about it earlier in the book. The attempts to interact with the dead take on an even more sinister and significant character when Hans successfully summons Joachim back to the world of the living with the help of Elly and her interlocutor in the underworld. The whole atmosphere of the sanatorium, and seemingly the world, changes after it. Violence and discordance breaks out in the sanatorium, Naphta and Settembrini’s never-ending intellectual jousting descends into an actual duel and, eventually, war breaks out across the world. This struck me as strange because the author, or perhaps it is only the narrator, initially seems incredulous about these supernatural undertakings but they quickly become the turning point for a dramatic disintegration of civil relations both in the sanatorium and the wider world. It’s hard not to think that it represents some historical event given its central significance to the plot’s development at the specific level of the sanatorium and globally. The incident when Hans, Elly and the others summon Joachim back from the dead does lead to an interesting perspective about the desirability of dead people returning to the realm of the living, “Ultimately, to put it plainly, it does not exist, this desirability. It is a miscalculation; by the light of cold day, it is impossible as the thing itself, which would be immediately evident if nature rescinded that impossibility even once; and what we call mourning is perhaps not so much the pain of the impossibility of ever seeing the dead return to life, as the pain of not being able to wish it.” (p805). I’m not sure I wholly agree with this although in practice it is impossible to say!
The sanatorium was cast in its most favourable light, for me, directly after Hans’ experience in the snowstorm. The storm itself struck me as the lodestone of the whole book and lent what small amount of understanding I did manage to gather from the swirling mass of themes and impressions contained in the rest of the story. Before the storm, it seemed like Hans was wasting his life away in a quack institution but after the snowstorm it seems like everything has all been worthwhile, if it’s caused him to have such seemingly invaluable epiphany; adding meaning and understanding to his life where before there was none. Expanding on the idea of the story as an allegory for the world, or Europe, perhaps the sanatorium is supposed to be a neutral backdrop with both positive and negative elements. I would probably reject this interpretation. I see the sanatorium being portrayed as creepy, unnatural and suspicious for some of the reasons I have outlined above.
The character of Hans is the central protagonist and is often referred to as a ‘hero’ by the narrator. It’s possible that Hans represents humanity as a whole or the general concept of ‘man’ within the world if the book’s plot is indeed an allegory of the world before WW1. The most persuasive evidence I have for this is the following passage: “I shall now call by its name: life’s problem child, man himself, his true state and condition.” (p584-5)
Against the idea that the sanatorium conspires to keep patients there is the theory that Hans himself wants to be ill and extend his stay at the sanatorium indefinitely. When Hans is introduced and we learn about his career he is described as having a preference for doing nothing, something that is well catered for at the sanatorium. He also demonstrates a dislike for the manner and social conduct of his family and friends down in the flatlands. Discussing his continued stay with Settembrini, who is an early and continual critic of this practice, Hans says, “What were the terms you used - detached and….And energetic! Fine, but what does that really mean? That means hard, cold. And what does hard and cold mean? It means cruel. The air down there is cruel, ruthless. Lying here and watching from a distance, it almost makes me shudder.” (p235) Clearly, Hans has a dislike for society down below and wishes to establish a distance between it and himself. The sanatorium provides an ideal solution in this regard. A worried Settembrini replies - “I will not attempt to gloss over the the specific forms life’s natural cruelty takes in your society. Be that as it may - the charge of cruelty is a rather sentimental charge. You would hardly have been able to make it there among your own people, for fear of looking ridiculous even to yourself. You have rightly left the making of that charge to life’s shirkers. For you to make it now is proof of a certain alienation that I would not like to see take root. Because a man who gets used to making that charge can very easily be lost to life, to the form of life for which he was born. Do you know what that means, my good engineer: ‘to be lost to life’? I know, I do indeed. I see it here every day. Within six months at the least, every young person who comes up here (and they are almost all young) has nothing in his head but flirting and taking his temperature. And within a year at the most he will never be able to take hold of any other sort of life, but will find any other life ‘cruel’ - or better, flawed and ignorant.” (p235-6) This prediction, in the long term, proves to be wrong but it is accurate in the short term. Not much later, Hans writes to his family to extend his stay yet again, “He signed it. That was done. This third letter home was comprehensive, it did the job - not in terms of conceptions of time valid down below, but in terms of those prevailing up here. It established HC’s freedom. That was the word he used, not explicitly, not by forming they syllables in his mind, but as something he felt in its most comprehensive sense, in the sense in which he head learned to understand it during his stay here” (p267) Given Hans’ family history, including the death of both his parents at a young age and growing up as an adopted child in an upper class family with a distant father figure, I think it is reasonable that he might feel some confusion and even disenchantment with the world. This is shown by the quote above regarding the ‘cruelty’ of life in the flatlands. It may also provide the reason, or even the psychological necessity, for his escape and retreat to the mountain. The narrator appears to agree with this, “We have as much right as anyone to private thoughts about the story unfolding here, and we would like to suggest that Hans Castrop would not have stayed with the people up here even this long beyond his originally planned date of departure, if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.” (p273)
Hans’ character undergoes a lot of change in the book. He begins as a bit of a windbag, prone to babbling on and cod philosophy. These tendencies are shown in full flow during one of his injections with Behrens (p417-19) but the narrator praises his skillful management of the conversation, which is surely mocking. He bangs on and bungles his attempts to be subtle in asking about the girl he fancies at the sanatorium, Clavdia Chauchat. In some ways, Hans is a small minded, impressionable pedant - he hates banging doors, his table mate for being stupid while being ill and prattles on to Behrens and his cousin occasionally. However at other points the author attributes quite profound insights about eternity, infinity and logic to him, “But does not the very positing of eternity and infinity imply the logical, mathematical negation of things limited and finite, their relative reduction to zero? Is a sequence of events possible in eternity, a juxtaposition of objects in infinity? How does our makeshift assumption of eternity and infinity square with concepts like distance, motion, change, or even the very existence of a finite body in space? Now there’s a real question for you!” (p409). He is also highly impressionable, tending to adopt the views of whomever he comes into contact with and seeing virtue in almost everything even if two of these things are contradictory. However, he never seems to wholly adopt the ideas that fall before him and remains broadly lethargic and suffers from ennui. After the snowstorm, Hans seems transformed.
During his time up the mountain, various modes of life are displayed to him via the characters of Joachim, Settembrini, Naphta, Clavdia and probably others too. These either make little effect on him or combine to create a part of, or prelude to, the grand epiphany he undergoes during his near death experience in the snowstorm. The wonderful character of Mynheer Peeperkorn also seems to contribute to his change in character but only appears after the central snowstorm event, so this may be more debateable. The character of Peeperkorn is mysterious and in some ways inscrutable to me but more on that later.
Hans has a strange reverence for, and relationship to, death. His early life is scarred by the loss of both parents and later his grandfather who has been in loco parentis. He seems to like the ceremony and gravity that surrounds death and revels in his ability to play the part of a mourner appropriately given the considerable practice he has acquired at a young age. His reverence also appears to extend to illness and he complains that one of the women at his table offends him because she is both very ill and very stupid. He seems to accord death and illness a kind of majestic, mythical status and even links it to the feeling of love when he’s professing his love to Clavdia, “[they’re both] carnal, and that is the source of their terror and great magic” (p407) This kind of fixation on death as something worthy and noble is well exemplified when he says, “But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.” (p550). Settembrini warns him against this idolisation of death and illness but Hans ignores him, as he often does, despite referring to him as his guide and teacher. Hans starts to visit dying patients in their rooms and presents them with flowers he buys from a florist in the village. Even thought this struck me as pretty weird and morbid, the invalids themselves seem pleased by his visits and he continues and extends them as they’re clearly enjoyable for him too. I tend to agree with Settembrini that this behaviour is unhealthy and even Hans seems to concur with this after his epiphany in the snowstorm declaring, “Love stands opposed to death - it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love and not reason, yields to kind thoughts.” (p588).
Hans’ lengthy obsession and brief love affair with Clavdia Chauchat (hot cat?) is another important strand in the his character’s development. Hans’ interest begins with his objection to her door slamming when she enters the dining room but even at this stage his disapproval has the flavour of a schoolboy being mean to the girl he has a crush on. Hans, however, doesn’t even venture this far and restricts himself to more subtle forms of interaction; glances, stares and drawing curtains to stop the sun from bothering her. His, repressed, claustrophobic interest in, and subsequent games to encounter, Clavdia are well drawn and exactly like the sort of crushes one develops when in close, but not familiar, confinement with others. One aspect of this that seemed strange to me was Hans’ reluctance to discuss his feeling with his cousin. Joachim, too, has a crush at the sanatorium but it is far less significant to the plot of the book. However, I would normally expect two well acquainted people, constantly in each others presence day after day, to discuss their feelings. My conclusion is that this is either fantastically unrealistic or that upper class Germany at this time was incredibly repressed! The storyline begins passively and then falls out of focus for a while as Hans’ develops his interest in physiology and visiting terminally ill patients; during this phase he barely seems to think about Clavida. The love story explodes back into the foreground during the Mardi Gras celebrations when the usual formalities are abandoned and everyone gets drunk. Hans professes his love to Clavdia and attempts to woo her in a strangely anatomical way around p400 proving himself to be a good deal less repressed than I had taken him to be based on his interactions with his cousin.
Hans’ motivations regarding Clavdia were a source of confusion for me from very early on in the book. Does Hans want to stay in the mountains because he is in love with her or does he simply want to stay up the mountain in general and Clavdia is a part of this more general desire or an entertainment while he does so? In the earlier paragraphs about the suspicious environment of sanatorium I had thought that there’s quite a lot to suggest that Hans’ simply wants to stay up in the mountains and that Clavdia is either an excuse to do so or a divertissement while he does so. However, Hans’ dramatic reaction to a withering look from Clavdia around p278 seems to indicate that he does care about her a great deal and, both interestingly and confusingly, that his harsh treatment has improved his raised temperature and other symptoms: “Two terrible days of depression had a chilling, sobering, slackening effect on HC’s nature, which, to his bitter humiliation, manifested itself in a very low temperature, barely above normal, and he came to the cruel realisation that his worry and grief had accomplished nothing except to place an even greater distance between himself and Clavdia’s being and nature.” (p278). As the passage indicates, this improvement only serves to compound Hans’ misery as he feels further from Clavida, presumably because he thinks he will have to go back down to the flat lands if he is cured. However, during the chapter ‘An Outburst of Temper’, when Hans’ is dismissed as cured by Behrens after his cousin announces he is going to leave, it seems that Hans will stay regardless. Hans offers his own testimony on the problem of his motivations for staying up the mountain during his declaration of love to Clavdia at Mardi Gras saying, “‘The fever in my body and the pounding of my exhausted heart and the trembling in my hands, it is anything but an episode, for it is nothing but’ - and he bent his pale face deeper towards hers, his lips twitching - ‘nothing but my love for you, or better, the love that I acknowledged once I recognised you - and it is that love, obviously, that has lead me to this place.” (p406). To me, this is not especially credible, first, because Hans is trying his hardest to persuade Clavdia of the intensity of his feelings; making him an unreliable and biased witness. Secondly, the very symptoms he describes go into remission when he feels spurned by Clavdia, which would be the opposite of what I would expect from the traditional conception of a lovesick person. Thirdly, the book mentions Hans’ symptoms from the moment he arrives at the sanatorium when he hasn’t even seen Clavdia. In this way, Hans’ true motivations seem enigmatic but this is not really problematic as they may have the same character for Hans himself! An aspect of their interaction that is far less satisfactory is the incredibly high blown, philosophical conversation they have at Mardi Gras, which is pretty inconceivable for two drunk people in their mid twenties who barely share a common language. It also struck me as out of character for Hans but that, like his uncharacteristic boldness on that night, could be attributed to alcohol.
It occured to me that perhaps Hans’ idea that his symptoms are due to his love for Clavdia spring from his obsession with illness. In the paragraph on Hans’ preoccupation with death, I quote him as equating the two because of their ‘carnal’ nature. He also thinks that the evidence of a previous illness that Behren’s finds during the X-ray of his lungs is owing to the love he had for his schoolmate who looked like Clavdia. He tells Clavdia that she and the schoolboy he loved are the same ‘intimate you’ of his life. In both cases, Hans’ uses the excuse of needing a pencil to initiate interaction between the two and in both cases the pencil is lent with the instruction to remember to return it. As with many sections of the book, I was uncertain what the ultimate significance of this was. In some ways, if it is not allegorical, it seems a bit fanciful and twee to have such obvious parallels. Is it supposed to show us that Hans is emotionally immature and yearns to fulfil his homoerotic love for his schoolmate through Clavida? Or is it, in an inversion of what Hans thinks, that he only falls in love when he is ill? It wasn’t clear to me what the implications were but, whatever the case, Clavdia’s parting keepsake of her X-ray photograph is an appropriate and touching gift given Hans’ beliefs about the situation. Hans does, seemingly, sleep with Clavdia before she departs although this isn’t described in detail, in keeping with the repressed tone of the novel. It is hinted at when the X ray is described on p462 as, “All surrounded by a pale, hazy halo, the flesh - of which, against all reason, Hans Castrop had tasted on Mardi Gras”. It is also hinted at a couple of other times in even more oblique formulations (p412, p421). So, while Mann clearly doesn’t want to write about it explicitly he definitely wants the reader to know that it has taken place!
Another of the novel’s central themes is time. It appears early on in the story as a subject of reflection for Hans and he is often found cogitating on its nature, for example, “that’s a matter of motion, of motion in space, correct? Wait, hear me out! And so we measure time with space. But that is the same thing as trying to measure space with time - the way uneducated people do. It’s 20 hrs from Hamburg to Davos - true, by train. But on foot, how far is it then? And in our minds - not even a second!” (p76). Throughout the book, the passage of time is recorded in great detail but such is the similarity of the scenes, eating, rest curing, walking, that even after one day I caught myself suspecting that Hans had been there longer and that in his discombobulation he had mistakenly recorded the length of his stay. It’s really very well done as it gives a vivid illustration of how life up in the mountains differs from that ‘down below’ and slips past rapidly as Settembrini notes to Hans. Hans himself notes the elusive quality of time, “Did the 7 weeks he had demonstrably, indubitably spent with these people here feel like a mere 7 days? Or did it seem to him just the opposite, that he had lived here now much, much longer than he really had? He asked himself those same questions, both privately of himself and formally of Joachim - but could not come to any decision. Probably both were true: looking back, the time he had spent here thus far seemed unnaturally brief and at the same time unnaturally long.” (p261). This passage accurately portrays the dualistic, seemingly contradictory nature of time. The problems presented by infinity when related to human experience of time are also a subject of reflection for Hans (see quotation from p409 on p5 of this essay).
Later on, when Hans has been at the sanatorium for months if not years, Mann himself comments on the slippery nature of time telling the reader that while they are probably aware that Hans has been there for a while they would struggle to specify exactly how long. This is not for want of information, Mann says that it is possible to go back through the book and construct a chronology based on the seasons etc., it’s because of the way it has been experienced by the reader; precisely the same way humans experience time relatively rather than have an innate, objective awareness of its passage. Furthermore, there are some hints that time and life share an inextricable link and that Hans may have come up to the mountain because of his dissatisfaction with one, the other, or both, the cause is, rather, something psychological, our very sense of time itself - which, if it flows with uninterrupted regularity, threatens to elude us and which is closely related to and bound up with our sense of life that the one sense cannot be weakened without the second’s experiencing pain and injury. A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it ‘pass,’ by which we mean ‘shorten’ it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it ‘boring’, but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all. Conversely, rich and interesting events are capable of filling time, until hours, even days, are shortened and speed past on wings; whereas on a larger scale, interest lends the passage of time breadth, solidity, and weight, so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than do paltry, bare, featherweight years that are blown before the wind and are gone” (p122). There’s also some evidence to suggest that Mann sees time as an artificial construction imposed upon the world by humanity that isn’t present in the natural world in the same way, “October began as new months are wont to do - their beginnings are perfectly modest and hushed, with no outward signs, no birthmarks. Indeed, they steal in silently and quite unnoticed, unless you are paying very strict attention. Real time knows no turning points, there are no thunderstorms or trumpet fanfares at the start of a new month or year, and even when a new century commences only we human beings fire cannon and ring bells.” (p268). On the whole, I found the book eloquent on the subject of time. Hans, as perhaps the main character through which these reflections take place, shows himself in a positive, philosophical light in these passages. However, there is some hint that Mann doesn’t approve of Hans’ philosophising on this topic, “Hans Castorp’s military cousin had been a ‘zealot’ - as a melancholic show-off once said - and that had led to a fatal outcome. Might we perhaps find some excuse for our young hero’s behaviour in assuming that such an outcome encouraged him in his disgraceful management of time, in his wicked dawdling with eternity?” (p649). I must say I found this passage hard to comprehend, does this even make sense? How do you dawdle in eternity? Everything is done and not done already! Whatever the actual meaning, it is one of the more impassioned passages that we hear from the narrator and seems to conflict with my broadly positive view of Hans’ philosophising about time.
The two characters of Settembrini and Naphta I’ll take together as a pair even though there is far more material on Settembrini and he features in the story from a far earlier stage. Once again, the feeling that these two are representative of larger themes, nations or events was inescapable. Clearly and explicitly, Settembrini symbolises liberalism and rationality as he declares himself on almost every occasion when he speaks. Against this stands Naphta, representative of religion and, perhaps, more specifically Catholicism. In an age when science and religion vied for preeminence in their ability to explain and guide life for humans, this much symbolic significance seems immediately and readily comprehensible. The two indulge in truly epic dialectics while a small audience of Hans, Joachim and a few others from the sanatorium watch and listen. While I have said that the broad strokes of the pair’s symbolism seems simple enough, the same certainly cannot be said for the minutiae of their debates. These are detailed at some length and were largely too arcane for me to understand fully. The subjects discussed ranged from morality to metaphysics to religion to economics. Many of the references were well beyond my ken but from what I could decipher Settembrini opposes his belief in rationality and the pursuit of earthly, empirical happiness against Naphta’s preference for spirituality, faith and belief in God rather than pursuit of any objective, scientific truth. The book contains page upon page of their debates and I couldn’t possibly hope to summarise their content. However, this passage may give a flavour, albeit brief, of Naphta’s attacks on rationality and intellectualism, “Saint Augustine’s statement: ‘I believe, that I may understand’ - is absolutely incontrovertible. Faith is the vehicle of understanding, the intellect is secondary. Your unbiased science is a myth. Faith, a world view, an idea - in short, the will - is always present, and it is then reason’s task to examine and prove it. In the end we always come down to ‘quod erat demonstrandum.’ The very notion of proof contains, psychologically speaking, a strong voluntaristic element.’ (p471). Even Mann seems to be aware of the overwhelming nature of the discussions between the two writing, “The two intellectual adversaries could engage in constant duels - and we could not hope to present them in their entirety without fear of likewise losing ourselves in the same desperate infinitude into which they daily threw themselves for their large audience” (p600). Despite Mann’s claim to have abridged and abbreviated, the polemics that he does reproduce are lengthy and confusing. Perhaps my feelings can best be summarised by Hans’ comment on p458 to his cousin Joachim, “I was paying attention, you see, but none of it was clear. Instead, the more they talked the more confused I got.” On the whole, I found the chapter ‘Someone Else’ to be confusing, high falutin and boring and Hans’ comments, which come at the chapter’s end, are probably the only truly easily comprehensible part!! The chapter appears to me as an intellectual version of the snowstorm whereby readers become disoriented and lost in the blizzard of point and and counterpoint. Given Hans’ reflections on these two characters after his experience in the storm, I feel it is justified to see some connection between the two. While I will write more about the storm later, it is also worth considering the ultimate fate of these two adversaries in the story. The two intellectuals eventually decide to settle their differences in a duel, which seems very out of character for both of them. However, at the crucial moment, Settembrini fires in the air and Naphta shoots himself in the head after calling Settembrini a coward. This may demonstrate some of Naphta’s religious convictions although I think I am correct in believing that suicide is also a sin within Catholicism so it is unclear to me what the Jesuit Naphta hopes to achieve by this act. To me, the more powerful message was that human differences can never be reconciled and will inevitably result in a violent and unhappy end.
From the outset, Settembrini is the more attractive of the two characters. He cuts an eccentric and endearing figure; full of intelligence and learning. He seems to bear his serious illness with stoicism and his shabby, unchanging clothing portrayed an admirable preference for learning above material goods, which I liked. He is witty and amusing in conversation with Hans and his cousin and also seems wise and humble. Hans sees him as guide and I was immediately struck by his seemingly sage advice to him to pack his bags and leave the sanatorium on the first day. He makes astute observations that amuse the cousins, mocks the sanatorium and appears to be one of the only patients capable of an independent perspective. He also corrects Hans’ philosophical errors; for example, warning against his reverence for illness and death, which seems sensible. He is also hawkish on the prospect of war from very early on, adding to the impression that he is, in some sense, prophetic. Later on in the book, things begin to seem a little less clear cut. In some senses, it seems necessary for Hans to stay at the sanatorium for a long time in order for him to have his epiphany. Viewed in this way, Settembrini’s desire for him to leave is less unequivocally positive. Indeed, my initial conception of Settembrini as a omniscient sage becomes less and less tenable as the book goes on. That said, it is Settembrini who helps Hans to accomplish his illicit skiing by helping to hide the equipment at the house he shares with Naphta so perhaps, in this indirect way, he can be seen as playing a role in Hans’ experience in the snowstorm and his subsequent return to the flat lands. Against that, it’s not altogether clear to me that Hans’ return is viewed as any better, morally or otherwise, than his time up the mountain. Intuitively, I had a slight preference for seeing him return to a more active, engaged existence with the world but if asked to support this philosophically I don’t think it would be the easiest case to make. The narrator doesn’t seem to speak definitively on the subject either. The passage that mentions Hans’ ‘wicked dawdling’ on p649 seems to be the as close as it gets to an outright condemnation of his conduct and even this passage is ambiguous. Settembrini is an explicit critic of Hans’ choice to stay up in the mountain but given his ambivalent status in the novel, it’s hard to see this as of any central importance. Naphta is a far less appealing character for me. His hardline, unswerving attitude leads him to endorse horrific historical events like the Spanish Inquisition. His militant Christianity and predilection for finery in his clothing and decoration of his house make uneasy bedfellows. He doesn’t seem to be living a very Christian life, if Jesus’ life is taken to be the exemplar, and I found him suspicious and creepy as a character. That said, he does make some valid criticisms of Settembrini and, in the final analysis, his devotion to his own Catholic ideas is no more or less valid than Settembrini’s fixation with rationalism. Equally, Settembrini’s liberalism doesn’t sit very well with his Freemasonry so both are, in some sense, flawed and alloyed characters. Settembrini also entertains ridiculous notions of the power that rationality and intellectualism hold. For instance, he tells Naphta he could cure a madman by looking into his eyes and hopes to eradicate human suffering by detailing every instance of it in an encyclopedia, which are both fanciful.
Naphta’s critique of science is especially memorable and returns to the problematic nature of time and infinity, which is a recurring theme in the book, “It was faith like any other, only worse and more obtuse than all the rest; and the word ‘science’ itself was the expression of the most stupid sort of realism, which did not blush at taking at face value the dubious reflections that objects left on the human mind and seeing them as the basis for the most dismal and vapid dogma anyone ever foisted on humanity. Was not the very idea of a world of senses that existed in and of itself the most ridiculous of all possible self-contradictions? But as a dogma, modern natural science lived exclusively and solely from the metaphysical assumption that the forms by which we recognise and organise reality - space, time, causality - reflect a real state of affairs existing independent of our knowledge. That monistic claim was the most naked piece of effrontery the Spirit had ever had to endure….The theory of infinite space and time - that was definitely based on experience, was it?...For the simple reason that in relation to infinity any given unit of mass approached zero. There was no size in infinity, and no duration or change in eternity, either. In infinite space, given that every distance is the mathematical equivalent of zero, there could be no two adjacent points, let alone a body, let alone movement.” (pp824-5)
Settembrini also appears to be a racist character as evidenced by several passages in the book. In Chapter 5, he links weakness and time wasting with being Asian, by which he mainly seems to mean Russian in this context. He has done this before when he argues that librality and reason are Western ideas that must be spread across the world. This is clearly racist although a more charitable interpretation might see him as encouraging Hans to live in accordance with his nature. He also places the mind above the body and champions reason above all (pp281-299). Within this section, when speaking about Asians and “Mongolian Muscovites” he says: “Do not model yourself on them, do not let them infect you with their ideas, but instead compare your own nature, your higher nature to theirs, and as a son of the West, of the divine West, hold sacred those things that both by nature and heritage are sacred to you. Time, for instance. This liberality, this barbaric extravagance in the use of time is the Asian style - that may be the reason why the children of the East feel so at home here.” (p289). This seems unequivocally racist to me and confirms that Settembrini sees his beloved rationality as a solely European trait. Rather more obliquely, Settembrini also seems to criticise Hans’ triste with Clavida along racial lines saying, “The gods and mortals have on occasion visited the realm of shades and found their way back. But those who reside in the nether world know that he who eats of the fruits of their realm is forever theirs” (p421). It may be possible to argue that this passage is an allegorical representation but I rather doubt this. Clavdia is presented as a patient much like all the others and so I see no need for the divisive language, which, to me, seems to guided by demarcations of race. Furthermore, his preference for mind above body seems to reach unusual, and perhaps unnatural, heights when he says, “But there is one force, one principle that is the object of my highest affirmation, my highest and ultimate respect and love, and that force, that principle, is the mind. However much I detest seeing that dubious construct of moonshine and cobwebs that goes by the name of ‘soul’ played off against the body, within the antithesis of the body and mind, it is the body that is the evil, devilish principle, because the body is nature, and nature - as an opposing force, I repeat, to mind, to reason - is evil, mystical and evil...You see, my good engineer, there you behold the mind’s great enmity toward nature, its proud mistrust of her, its greathearted insistence on the right to criticise her and her evil, irrational power.” And later on, still speaking about the body, “One must respect and defend it, when it serves the cause of emancipation and beauty, of freedom of the senses, of happiness and desire. One must despise it insofar as it is the principle of gravity and inertia opposing the flow toward the light, insofar as it represents the principle of disease and death, insofar as its quintessence is a matter of perversity, of corruption, of lust and disgrace.” (pp296-8). All of these factors combine to undermine the earlier, more positive, conception of Settembrini as a fair minded sage. After all, he seems to be a crackpot extremist obsessed with reason, which he sees as exclusive to Europeans thus placing them above all other races.
The two most striking parts of the book, for me, were the snowstorm, which appears to be an obvious centre piece and turning point for Hans where he has his epiphany-dream, and the appearance of the character Mynheer Peeperkorn at the sanatorium. Both seem to show a break with what has gone before and serve to reinvigorate Hans and shake him out of his timeless, stagnant state of torpor.
The storm is wonderfully well written and vividly realised. Amidst the total confusion and hostility of the storm the prospects of Hans’ survival look slim. However, just as Hans seems resigned to death when he falls asleep against the side of a hut up in the mountains he awakens to find the storm passed and his senses once again able to guide him. In a similar and parallel way, Hans epiphany allows him to see through the blizzard conditions of Naphta and Settembrini’s arguments and their myopic obsessions with their ways of interpreting the world. He emerges revivified and newly capable of seeing his way in the world; something he seemed totally incapable of before. The dream itself is strange and involves a sunny utopia where people are kind to one another. However, behind this loving community lies a temple where babies are sacrificed by two witches. On awakening he wonders, “Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror? What a fine and gallant conclusion for them to draw! I shall hold to their side, here in my soul, and not with Naphta, or for that matter with Settembrini - they’re both windbags. The one is voluptuous and malicious, and the other is forever tooting his little horn of reason and even imagines he can stare madmen back to sanity - how preposterous, how philistine!” (p587). Here, I see Hans as emerging from his somewhat dejected period of isolation at the sanatorium and finding a new way of understanding the world. For example, with unusual certainty and a kind of new found confidence that isn’t derived from listening to someone else’s theories, “Love stands opposed to death - it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love and not reason, yields to kind thoughts…..My heart is beating strong and knows why. It beats not for purely physical reasons, the way fingernails grow on a corpse. It beats for human reasons and because my spirit is truly happy.” (p588). This appeal to love and feeling circumvents both Settembrini’s fixation with reason, which it clearly renounces, but also Naphta’s worldview with its preoccupation with religious doctrine. In spite of this seemingly rosy outcome, there remains a dark side to Hans vision. The sacrifice of babies taking place, and perhaps even underpinning the civil behaviour of the ‘sunny folk’, seems to represent an avoidable violence and cruelty in the world against which humans may choose to react with love. In the same way that Naphta and Settembrini eventually descend into a duel, albeit an unusual one, Mann seems to be pointing out that violence and death are, unavoidably, the ways of the world irrespective of how much love the human spirit can find within itself. While this recognition is depressing, it also seems undeniably true.
Mynheer Peeperkorn bursts onto the scene late in the book as Clavdia’s new lover. Strangely, Hans doesn’t seem to feel any jealousy at all towards him, which strikes me as quite improbable if we take Hans’ own professions of love to Clavdia at face value. I suppose it is possible that Clavdia was always an excuse to stay up the mountain, as I wrote about earlier, and after his experience in the snowstorm he no longer feels the need to stay up in the mountains and, therefore, no longer needs her as an excuse to do so. Another unusual aspect of Clavdia and Mynheer’s relationship, as it relates to Hans, is the fact that both solicit his partnership in ‘alliances’ for the benefit of the other. Both also make a point of saying that such alliances are usually formed against a third party rather than for them, as is the case here. Once again, I suspected that this was allegorical insofar as many countries surely formed alliances, or at the least sought them, in the run up to the First World War. However, with no easy knowledge of which nations are represented by these characters I can’t take this line of thought any further. Suffice to say it is unusual and unrealistic, to me, that Hans is so well disposed towards the lovers given his own apparent love for Clavdia. Mynheer is totally different from the other characters that Hans looks to for guidance. He makes no appeal to intellectualism, unlike Naphta and Settembrini, but is effortlessly more persuasive and magnetic than both. He is referred to as ‘a personality’ constantly in the text and brings everyone at the sanatorium under his influence by the force of this personality alone. He barely says anything, speaking in meaningless fragments but can command the entire population enticing them into late night binges and trips to the waterfalls. At his appearance, the book takes a turn for the better leaving behind the boring, confusing dialectics of Naphta and Settembrini and bringing instead highly entertaining scenes of his freewheeling and bacchanalian charm. He draws everyone’s attention, especially Hans’, with his lavish consumption and charisma. This is very well illustrated in the way that he takes the attention away from one of their neverending arguments by looking at an eagle in the sky. Settembrini criticises Hans for being swayed by popularity and aesthetics but there seems to be more to Peeperkorn, encapsulated in his exhortations to ‘feel’. However, if there is more to Peeperkorn, and my feeling is there was, it is never really quantified and is only hinted at via the huge effect he has on the people around him. This way of experiencing life, and above all feeling it, seems to be set against Settembrini’s appeal to reason and Naptha’s appeal to religion. Nonetheless, Peeperkorn ends up drinking himself to death and it was never clear to me exactly what effect he had had on Hans. Perhaps my best guess is that his character represents how important it is to be active and enjoy life, regardless of the ultimate consequences, which in this case appear to be death. Against this, he is already quite elderly when he arrives at the sanatorium so perhaps there is no greater significance to his death. In some senses he is a positive example and a breath of fresh air, both in the novel and at the sanatorium, but in another it’s hard to point to any definite philosophical positives that he embodies beyond his ability to have fun and connect with people in spite of his basic inability to say anything! He feels highly significant as a character but when I try to pin down this significance he seems to come out as a thoughtless hedonist. The only passage in which he is more coherent relates to the theme of feeling and this may signal its potential importance to understanding his role in the book, “I repeat, that it is our duty, our religious duty to feel. Our feeling, you see, is our manly vigour, which awakens life. Life slumbers. It wants to be awakened, roused to drunken nuptials with divine feeling. Because feeling, young man, is divine. Man himself is divine in that he feels. He is the very feeling of God. God created him in order to feel through him. Man is nothing more than the organ by which God consummates His marriage with awakened and intoxicated life. And if man fails to feel, it is an eruption of divine disgrace, it is the defeat of God’s manly vigour, a cosmic catastrophe, a horror that never leaves the mind” (p717).
One thing that was really brilliant and memorable was Mann’s writing of Peeperkorn’s dialogue. He is a hugely engaging ‘personality’ for the reader, just as he is for Hans and the other patients. Right from the start he is an imposing, exotic and majestic figure physically. He is also wonderfully and appropriately named for a Dutch-Indonesian spice magnate. His manner of speech is fantastic and spectacularly well written, for example, “In a rather low voice, he said, ‘Ladies and gentleman. Fine. How very fine. That set-tles it. And yet you must keep in mind and never - not for a moment - lose sight of the fact that - but enough on that topic. What is incumbent upon me to say is not so much that, but primarily and above all this: that we are duty-bound, that we are charged with an inviolable - I repeat with all due emphasis - inviolable obligation - No! No, ladies and gentlemen, not that I - oh, how very mistaken it would be to think that I - but that set-tles it, ladies and gentlemen. Settles it completely. I know we are all of one mind, and so then, to the point!” (p653). And again a little later, “‘Splendid!’ Peeperkorn cried, throwing himself against the back of his chair an stretching one arm out to the dwarf. The tone of his cry seemed to say, ‘Well, who could object to that! It’s all so wonderful!’ - ‘My child,’ he continued now in an earnest, almost stern voice, ‘that exceeds my every expectation. Emerentia - you pronounce it with modesty, but the name - and taken together with your person - in short, it reveals the loveliest possibilities. ‘Tis well worth musing upon, giving rein to all the emotions that well up in one’s chest, so that one may - but as a nickname, you must understand, my child, as a nickname - it might be Rentia, or even Emchen would cheer the heart - but for the moment I shall without hesitation hold fast to Emchen. So then, Emchen my child, listen well: a little bread, my dear. Wait! Stay! Let there be no misunderstanding. I can read from your relatively broad face that there is the danger of - bread, Renzchen, but not baked bread, of that we have a sufficiency, in all shapes and sizes. Not baked, but distilled, my angel. The bread of God, clear as crystal, my little Nickname, that we may be regaled. I am uncertain whether what I intend by using that term - I might suggest ‘a cordial for the heart’ as an alternative, if that term did not likewise run the danger of being taken in a more common, thoughtless sense - but that set-tles it, Rentia. Settles it, over and done! Or rather, in light of our duty, our holy obligation - for example, the debt of honour incumbent upon me to turn with a most cordial heart to you, so small but full of character - a gin, my love! To gladden my heart, might I say. A gin, a Schiedam gin, my Emerenzchen. Make haste to bring it to me.” (pp654-655). This whole vivacious, fragementory monologue achieves the same as ‘A gin, please’ but also so much more! His character is very well drawn even if his ultimate significance is somewhat more enigmatic.
The book ends with Hans returning to the flatlands to fight in World War I. The final scenes see him in battle, watched by the narrator. I was disappointed that there wasn’t more detail or information on what occasioned this sudden change of heart in Hans. The advent of WW1 is described as a ‘thunderbolt’ for him but we learn little or nothing of the details of his mental or psychological state around this time. The death of his cousin and his uncle, Counsol Tieppenel, who acted as his father after his parents died cannot tempt him down to the world below, in spite of his obsession with death and love of funerals, but the prospect of a bloody war can. I suppose it could be argued that war holds the promise of death on a far grander scale. This is odd and, again, seems to describe violence and war as an unavoidable and natural part of the human condition, indeed, something necessary. The fact that Settembrini and Naphta eventually descend into violence, after all their scholarly discussion, seems to have some parallel in Hans’ years of reflection finally ending in him descending to join the war. Seeing Hans on the battlefield after years of rest cures and ‘playing king’ up the mountain is both invigorating and horrible. The narrator says of the young men going into battle, “That they do it with joy, and also with boundless fear and an unutterable longing for home, is both shameful and sublime, but surely no reason to bring them here to this.” (p852). This ending seems to suggest that violence and death are in some way part of the natural order that will eventually give the foundation for fresh life and love, which is also hinted at in the dream Hans has in the snowstorm.
I found this book enigmatic and confusing. Some of it is beautifully written. For instance: Hans’ journey up into the mountain, the early parts of Settembrini’s character, the snowstorm, the discussion Hans has with Behrens about cigars (p310), certain passages reflecting on the nature of time and the character and monologues of Mynheer Peeperkorn. However, other parts are boring, long winded, arcane or all three. For example, the lengthy sections on biology in ‘Research’, the seemingly never ending, abstruse debates between Settembrini and Naphta in ‘Someone Else’ and the uncertain status of Behrens, the sanatorium and his treatments. I was often left feeling like there was some greater significance that I hadn’t grasped. In the end, I started to feel like the book just isn’t very clear about the points it wants to make and for this reason I found it difficult to enjoy as a whole. Some parts are wonderful but others are boring and soporific and by the end I felt like I hadn’t really understood why this is considered to be such a classic. It deals with weighty subjects but isn’t a philosophical treatise, it has some great characters, events and dialogues but overall isn’t an amazing story and so I ended up feeling like it is a rather confusing and unsatisfactory mixture of the two. It was an interesting and thought provoking book full of ideas and had several highly enjoyable sections but my failure to find sufficient unity in the whole left me feeling a bit disappointed with it.
I definitely had the sense that I was missing quite a lot in this symbolic or allegorical sense. Without knowing how much I am missing, it also seemed to me that the book contained so much more than this. I should also mention that I resisted the urge to read secondary interpretations of the allegorical nature of the book so as to keep my own impressions and reactions as authentic as possible. I feel it would be very easy to read a coherent explanation of such a complex book and suddenly come to adopt these suggestions wholesale. Given how famous the book is, I’m sure such explanations are abundant.
The book starts off impressively, proceeding at an agreeable pace with intricate, but not verbose or boring, detail of description. The books ‘hero’, Castrop, journeys up to a mountain sanatorium in Switzerland where his cousin, Joachim, is attempting to recover from pneumonia before joining the army. Interwoven into the narrative of his journey and reunion with his cousin is Castrop’s brief, but illuminating, personal history, which is detailed but not lengthy. The intimacy between the two is well drawn and the ease with which they settle into renewing their acquaintance in the alps helped me settle into the lengthy book as a reader. This feeling of tranquility was soon disrupted by the atmosphere of the sanatorium, which is creepy and surreal.
Both the doctors at the sanatorium, Director Behrens and his assistant Krokowski, the psychoanalyst, have an unsettling quality. My suspicions were immediately raised, perhaps wrongly, by the fact that everyone seems to have to stay at there for an indefinite period of time. This could be explained by the difficult nature of the diseases being treated there but I felt there were some hints that there might be a more commercial motivation behind the director’s continual extensions of the patients’ sentences. Later on, it becomes clear that the patients may actually be the motivating force behind the extension of their stays but I’ll discuss that more when I write about Castorp’s character in more detail. Hans seems remarkably sanguine about the seeming deterioration in his own health soon after he arrives. He feels faint, coughs up blood and can barely complete a innocuous walk. Initially I had the idea that Hans was being drugged by the doctors, perhaps via the beer he asks for after his meal. His pumping heart, bloodshot eyes and flushed complexion could be put down to the altitude. However, his sleepiness and inability to remember details such as his own age, struck me as suspicious. He also seems remarkably relaxed about coughing up blood on the second day. I wondered if pneumonia was infectious, which it isn’t really I discovered!
Hans’ purchase of a thermometer from the nurse during her rounds and his commencement of taking his temperature four times a day and charting the results like the other patients is another odd development. Again, I initially saw this pointing towards a ploy by the sanatorium to keep him there; perhaps by giving him a faulty thermometer. Later on, I began to see it as more of an attempt to stay by Hans himself especially given that most of the time his temperature is barely above the normal range. This is even commented on in the book itself, where reference is made to Hans’, “chronically slightly raised temperature” (p460). Indeed, once Hans has been at the sanatorium for an extremely long time he no longer receives even the pretense of medical attention and the previous activities are referred to as ‘medical diversions’ (p840). The buying of blankets to use on his balcony and his adoption of the numerous ‘rest cures’ may be other signs that Hans is being sucked into this disconcerting world of the ill and contribute to the creepy, unnerving atmosphere.
Eventually, and somewhat inevitably I felt, Hans becomes a patient. Joachim and Settembrini, who have been sceptics about the fact that everyone has to stay so long, try to warn Hans off extending his stay. Indeed, Joachim argues with Hans that he recovered from illness ‘down below’ without any problems so should go back. Hans, who is quite biddable in other passages, surprisingly rejects both his friends and chooses to stay. I’m also surprised that he isn’t more suspicious that he’s not the only one that has come up healthy and then turned sick; the Mexican woman’s second son being the other. The feeling that the sanatorium is something of a quack institution returned when Joachim tells Behrens that he won’t stay any longer and will leave, having stayed 6-9 months already. Behrens reacts angrily and tells Hans that he is free to go too without even examining him. The whole incident is strange and is explained by the narrator, and Hans, as a fit of rage on Behrens’ part. This is could have been brought on by Joachim’s refusal to take his advice or perhaps for unrevealed private reasons. In either case, Joachim does indeed leave but Hans remains. As Hans’ stay becomes ever longer, his cousin James Tiepennel comes to ‘reclaim’ Hans to the ‘flat lands’. This visit is also highly unusual and suspicious. The encounter follows exactly the same path as Hans own arrival when he comes to visit Joachim down to minute details - the train, the blanket, the restaurant, the uneasy impression Hans makes, the inane laughter of the resident and debilitating fatigue of the visitor at supper, the chance meeting with Dr Krokowski and the identical diagnosis by Behrens at breakfast (even including the pulling down of one eye!) - it reminded me of the circular description of the seasons. But here the cycle is broken because cousin Tiepennel realises that the life of the sanatorium will take a hold of him and escapes without even saying goodbye to Hans. I felt, surely, Hans should be somewhat perturbed and, perhaps, should feel like he has been the subject of some kind of fraud when he sees that his healthy cousin is diagnosed exactly like he was when he arrived. However, for whatever reason, it seems Hans is too deeply inculcated in the society of the sanatorium and, perhaps more importantly, has acquired status and placed meaning in it, as he desired to do all along. At this stage, I had the strong impression that he had been brainwashed in one form or another; either by the doctors, the environment,his own psychology or a combination of all three.
The sanatorium is probably most disconcerting during the period of seances and supernatural occurrences that take place after the arrival of Elly. A great number of the patients are involved in these attempts to make contact with the world of the dead, which seems strange. The author seems critical of Dr Krokowski for superintending such efforts and this is in keeping with the wary comments he makes about his lectures and practice of psychoanalysis. Hans, however, does end up attending psychoanalysis in spite of his own reservations about it earlier in the book. The attempts to interact with the dead take on an even more sinister and significant character when Hans successfully summons Joachim back to the world of the living with the help of Elly and her interlocutor in the underworld. The whole atmosphere of the sanatorium, and seemingly the world, changes after it. Violence and discordance breaks out in the sanatorium, Naphta and Settembrini’s never-ending intellectual jousting descends into an actual duel and, eventually, war breaks out across the world. This struck me as strange because the author, or perhaps it is only the narrator, initially seems incredulous about these supernatural undertakings but they quickly become the turning point for a dramatic disintegration of civil relations both in the sanatorium and the wider world. It’s hard not to think that it represents some historical event given its central significance to the plot’s development at the specific level of the sanatorium and globally. The incident when Hans, Elly and the others summon Joachim back from the dead does lead to an interesting perspective about the desirability of dead people returning to the realm of the living, “Ultimately, to put it plainly, it does not exist, this desirability. It is a miscalculation; by the light of cold day, it is impossible as the thing itself, which would be immediately evident if nature rescinded that impossibility even once; and what we call mourning is perhaps not so much the pain of the impossibility of ever seeing the dead return to life, as the pain of not being able to wish it.” (p805). I’m not sure I wholly agree with this although in practice it is impossible to say!
The sanatorium was cast in its most favourable light, for me, directly after Hans’ experience in the snowstorm. The storm itself struck me as the lodestone of the whole book and lent what small amount of understanding I did manage to gather from the swirling mass of themes and impressions contained in the rest of the story. Before the storm, it seemed like Hans was wasting his life away in a quack institution but after the snowstorm it seems like everything has all been worthwhile, if it’s caused him to have such seemingly invaluable epiphany; adding meaning and understanding to his life where before there was none. Expanding on the idea of the story as an allegory for the world, or Europe, perhaps the sanatorium is supposed to be a neutral backdrop with both positive and negative elements. I would probably reject this interpretation. I see the sanatorium being portrayed as creepy, unnatural and suspicious for some of the reasons I have outlined above.
The character of Hans is the central protagonist and is often referred to as a ‘hero’ by the narrator. It’s possible that Hans represents humanity as a whole or the general concept of ‘man’ within the world if the book’s plot is indeed an allegory of the world before WW1. The most persuasive evidence I have for this is the following passage: “I shall now call by its name: life’s problem child, man himself, his true state and condition.” (p584-5)
Against the idea that the sanatorium conspires to keep patients there is the theory that Hans himself wants to be ill and extend his stay at the sanatorium indefinitely. When Hans is introduced and we learn about his career he is described as having a preference for doing nothing, something that is well catered for at the sanatorium. He also demonstrates a dislike for the manner and social conduct of his family and friends down in the flatlands. Discussing his continued stay with Settembrini, who is an early and continual critic of this practice, Hans says, “What were the terms you used - detached and….And energetic! Fine, but what does that really mean? That means hard, cold. And what does hard and cold mean? It means cruel. The air down there is cruel, ruthless. Lying here and watching from a distance, it almost makes me shudder.” (p235) Clearly, Hans has a dislike for society down below and wishes to establish a distance between it and himself. The sanatorium provides an ideal solution in this regard. A worried Settembrini replies - “I will not attempt to gloss over the the specific forms life’s natural cruelty takes in your society. Be that as it may - the charge of cruelty is a rather sentimental charge. You would hardly have been able to make it there among your own people, for fear of looking ridiculous even to yourself. You have rightly left the making of that charge to life’s shirkers. For you to make it now is proof of a certain alienation that I would not like to see take root. Because a man who gets used to making that charge can very easily be lost to life, to the form of life for which he was born. Do you know what that means, my good engineer: ‘to be lost to life’? I know, I do indeed. I see it here every day. Within six months at the least, every young person who comes up here (and they are almost all young) has nothing in his head but flirting and taking his temperature. And within a year at the most he will never be able to take hold of any other sort of life, but will find any other life ‘cruel’ - or better, flawed and ignorant.” (p235-6) This prediction, in the long term, proves to be wrong but it is accurate in the short term. Not much later, Hans writes to his family to extend his stay yet again, “He signed it. That was done. This third letter home was comprehensive, it did the job - not in terms of conceptions of time valid down below, but in terms of those prevailing up here. It established HC’s freedom. That was the word he used, not explicitly, not by forming they syllables in his mind, but as something he felt in its most comprehensive sense, in the sense in which he head learned to understand it during his stay here” (p267) Given Hans’ family history, including the death of both his parents at a young age and growing up as an adopted child in an upper class family with a distant father figure, I think it is reasonable that he might feel some confusion and even disenchantment with the world. This is shown by the quote above regarding the ‘cruelty’ of life in the flatlands. It may also provide the reason, or even the psychological necessity, for his escape and retreat to the mountain. The narrator appears to agree with this, “We have as much right as anyone to private thoughts about the story unfolding here, and we would like to suggest that Hans Castrop would not have stayed with the people up here even this long beyond his originally planned date of departure, if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.” (p273)
Hans’ character undergoes a lot of change in the book. He begins as a bit of a windbag, prone to babbling on and cod philosophy. These tendencies are shown in full flow during one of his injections with Behrens (p417-19) but the narrator praises his skillful management of the conversation, which is surely mocking. He bangs on and bungles his attempts to be subtle in asking about the girl he fancies at the sanatorium, Clavdia Chauchat. In some ways, Hans is a small minded, impressionable pedant - he hates banging doors, his table mate for being stupid while being ill and prattles on to Behrens and his cousin occasionally. However at other points the author attributes quite profound insights about eternity, infinity and logic to him, “But does not the very positing of eternity and infinity imply the logical, mathematical negation of things limited and finite, their relative reduction to zero? Is a sequence of events possible in eternity, a juxtaposition of objects in infinity? How does our makeshift assumption of eternity and infinity square with concepts like distance, motion, change, or even the very existence of a finite body in space? Now there’s a real question for you!” (p409). He is also highly impressionable, tending to adopt the views of whomever he comes into contact with and seeing virtue in almost everything even if two of these things are contradictory. However, he never seems to wholly adopt the ideas that fall before him and remains broadly lethargic and suffers from ennui. After the snowstorm, Hans seems transformed.
During his time up the mountain, various modes of life are displayed to him via the characters of Joachim, Settembrini, Naphta, Clavdia and probably others too. These either make little effect on him or combine to create a part of, or prelude to, the grand epiphany he undergoes during his near death experience in the snowstorm. The wonderful character of Mynheer Peeperkorn also seems to contribute to his change in character but only appears after the central snowstorm event, so this may be more debateable. The character of Peeperkorn is mysterious and in some ways inscrutable to me but more on that later.
Hans has a strange reverence for, and relationship to, death. His early life is scarred by the loss of both parents and later his grandfather who has been in loco parentis. He seems to like the ceremony and gravity that surrounds death and revels in his ability to play the part of a mourner appropriately given the considerable practice he has acquired at a young age. His reverence also appears to extend to illness and he complains that one of the women at his table offends him because she is both very ill and very stupid. He seems to accord death and illness a kind of majestic, mythical status and even links it to the feeling of love when he’s professing his love to Clavdia, “[they’re both] carnal, and that is the source of their terror and great magic” (p407) This kind of fixation on death as something worthy and noble is well exemplified when he says, “But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.” (p550). Settembrini warns him against this idolisation of death and illness but Hans ignores him, as he often does, despite referring to him as his guide and teacher. Hans starts to visit dying patients in their rooms and presents them with flowers he buys from a florist in the village. Even thought this struck me as pretty weird and morbid, the invalids themselves seem pleased by his visits and he continues and extends them as they’re clearly enjoyable for him too. I tend to agree with Settembrini that this behaviour is unhealthy and even Hans seems to concur with this after his epiphany in the snowstorm declaring, “Love stands opposed to death - it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love and not reason, yields to kind thoughts.” (p588).
Hans’ lengthy obsession and brief love affair with Clavdia Chauchat (hot cat?) is another important strand in the his character’s development. Hans’ interest begins with his objection to her door slamming when she enters the dining room but even at this stage his disapproval has the flavour of a schoolboy being mean to the girl he has a crush on. Hans, however, doesn’t even venture this far and restricts himself to more subtle forms of interaction; glances, stares and drawing curtains to stop the sun from bothering her. His, repressed, claustrophobic interest in, and subsequent games to encounter, Clavdia are well drawn and exactly like the sort of crushes one develops when in close, but not familiar, confinement with others. One aspect of this that seemed strange to me was Hans’ reluctance to discuss his feeling with his cousin. Joachim, too, has a crush at the sanatorium but it is far less significant to the plot of the book. However, I would normally expect two well acquainted people, constantly in each others presence day after day, to discuss their feelings. My conclusion is that this is either fantastically unrealistic or that upper class Germany at this time was incredibly repressed! The storyline begins passively and then falls out of focus for a while as Hans’ develops his interest in physiology and visiting terminally ill patients; during this phase he barely seems to think about Clavida. The love story explodes back into the foreground during the Mardi Gras celebrations when the usual formalities are abandoned and everyone gets drunk. Hans professes his love to Clavdia and attempts to woo her in a strangely anatomical way around p400 proving himself to be a good deal less repressed than I had taken him to be based on his interactions with his cousin.
Hans’ motivations regarding Clavdia were a source of confusion for me from very early on in the book. Does Hans want to stay in the mountains because he is in love with her or does he simply want to stay up the mountain in general and Clavdia is a part of this more general desire or an entertainment while he does so? In the earlier paragraphs about the suspicious environment of sanatorium I had thought that there’s quite a lot to suggest that Hans’ simply wants to stay up in the mountains and that Clavdia is either an excuse to do so or a divertissement while he does so. However, Hans’ dramatic reaction to a withering look from Clavdia around p278 seems to indicate that he does care about her a great deal and, both interestingly and confusingly, that his harsh treatment has improved his raised temperature and other symptoms: “Two terrible days of depression had a chilling, sobering, slackening effect on HC’s nature, which, to his bitter humiliation, manifested itself in a very low temperature, barely above normal, and he came to the cruel realisation that his worry and grief had accomplished nothing except to place an even greater distance between himself and Clavdia’s being and nature.” (p278). As the passage indicates, this improvement only serves to compound Hans’ misery as he feels further from Clavida, presumably because he thinks he will have to go back down to the flat lands if he is cured. However, during the chapter ‘An Outburst of Temper’, when Hans’ is dismissed as cured by Behrens after his cousin announces he is going to leave, it seems that Hans will stay regardless. Hans offers his own testimony on the problem of his motivations for staying up the mountain during his declaration of love to Clavdia at Mardi Gras saying, “‘The fever in my body and the pounding of my exhausted heart and the trembling in my hands, it is anything but an episode, for it is nothing but’ - and he bent his pale face deeper towards hers, his lips twitching - ‘nothing but my love for you, or better, the love that I acknowledged once I recognised you - and it is that love, obviously, that has lead me to this place.” (p406). To me, this is not especially credible, first, because Hans is trying his hardest to persuade Clavdia of the intensity of his feelings; making him an unreliable and biased witness. Secondly, the very symptoms he describes go into remission when he feels spurned by Clavdia, which would be the opposite of what I would expect from the traditional conception of a lovesick person. Thirdly, the book mentions Hans’ symptoms from the moment he arrives at the sanatorium when he hasn’t even seen Clavdia. In this way, Hans’ true motivations seem enigmatic but this is not really problematic as they may have the same character for Hans himself! An aspect of their interaction that is far less satisfactory is the incredibly high blown, philosophical conversation they have at Mardi Gras, which is pretty inconceivable for two drunk people in their mid twenties who barely share a common language. It also struck me as out of character for Hans but that, like his uncharacteristic boldness on that night, could be attributed to alcohol.
It occured to me that perhaps Hans’ idea that his symptoms are due to his love for Clavdia spring from his obsession with illness. In the paragraph on Hans’ preoccupation with death, I quote him as equating the two because of their ‘carnal’ nature. He also thinks that the evidence of a previous illness that Behren’s finds during the X-ray of his lungs is owing to the love he had for his schoolmate who looked like Clavdia. He tells Clavdia that she and the schoolboy he loved are the same ‘intimate you’ of his life. In both cases, Hans’ uses the excuse of needing a pencil to initiate interaction between the two and in both cases the pencil is lent with the instruction to remember to return it. As with many sections of the book, I was uncertain what the ultimate significance of this was. In some ways, if it is not allegorical, it seems a bit fanciful and twee to have such obvious parallels. Is it supposed to show us that Hans is emotionally immature and yearns to fulfil his homoerotic love for his schoolmate through Clavida? Or is it, in an inversion of what Hans thinks, that he only falls in love when he is ill? It wasn’t clear to me what the implications were but, whatever the case, Clavdia’s parting keepsake of her X-ray photograph is an appropriate and touching gift given Hans’ beliefs about the situation. Hans does, seemingly, sleep with Clavdia before she departs although this isn’t described in detail, in keeping with the repressed tone of the novel. It is hinted at when the X ray is described on p462 as, “All surrounded by a pale, hazy halo, the flesh - of which, against all reason, Hans Castrop had tasted on Mardi Gras”. It is also hinted at a couple of other times in even more oblique formulations (p412, p421). So, while Mann clearly doesn’t want to write about it explicitly he definitely wants the reader to know that it has taken place!
Another of the novel’s central themes is time. It appears early on in the story as a subject of reflection for Hans and he is often found cogitating on its nature, for example, “that’s a matter of motion, of motion in space, correct? Wait, hear me out! And so we measure time with space. But that is the same thing as trying to measure space with time - the way uneducated people do. It’s 20 hrs from Hamburg to Davos - true, by train. But on foot, how far is it then? And in our minds - not even a second!” (p76). Throughout the book, the passage of time is recorded in great detail but such is the similarity of the scenes, eating, rest curing, walking, that even after one day I caught myself suspecting that Hans had been there longer and that in his discombobulation he had mistakenly recorded the length of his stay. It’s really very well done as it gives a vivid illustration of how life up in the mountains differs from that ‘down below’ and slips past rapidly as Settembrini notes to Hans. Hans himself notes the elusive quality of time, “Did the 7 weeks he had demonstrably, indubitably spent with these people here feel like a mere 7 days? Or did it seem to him just the opposite, that he had lived here now much, much longer than he really had? He asked himself those same questions, both privately of himself and formally of Joachim - but could not come to any decision. Probably both were true: looking back, the time he had spent here thus far seemed unnaturally brief and at the same time unnaturally long.” (p261). This passage accurately portrays the dualistic, seemingly contradictory nature of time. The problems presented by infinity when related to human experience of time are also a subject of reflection for Hans (see quotation from p409 on p5 of this essay).
Later on, when Hans has been at the sanatorium for months if not years, Mann himself comments on the slippery nature of time telling the reader that while they are probably aware that Hans has been there for a while they would struggle to specify exactly how long. This is not for want of information, Mann says that it is possible to go back through the book and construct a chronology based on the seasons etc., it’s because of the way it has been experienced by the reader; precisely the same way humans experience time relatively rather than have an innate, objective awareness of its passage. Furthermore, there are some hints that time and life share an inextricable link and that Hans may have come up to the mountain because of his dissatisfaction with one, the other, or both, the cause is, rather, something psychological, our very sense of time itself - which, if it flows with uninterrupted regularity, threatens to elude us and which is closely related to and bound up with our sense of life that the one sense cannot be weakened without the second’s experiencing pain and injury. A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it ‘pass,’ by which we mean ‘shorten’ it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it ‘boring’, but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all. Conversely, rich and interesting events are capable of filling time, until hours, even days, are shortened and speed past on wings; whereas on a larger scale, interest lends the passage of time breadth, solidity, and weight, so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than do paltry, bare, featherweight years that are blown before the wind and are gone” (p122). There’s also some evidence to suggest that Mann sees time as an artificial construction imposed upon the world by humanity that isn’t present in the natural world in the same way, “October began as new months are wont to do - their beginnings are perfectly modest and hushed, with no outward signs, no birthmarks. Indeed, they steal in silently and quite unnoticed, unless you are paying very strict attention. Real time knows no turning points, there are no thunderstorms or trumpet fanfares at the start of a new month or year, and even when a new century commences only we human beings fire cannon and ring bells.” (p268). On the whole, I found the book eloquent on the subject of time. Hans, as perhaps the main character through which these reflections take place, shows himself in a positive, philosophical light in these passages. However, there is some hint that Mann doesn’t approve of Hans’ philosophising on this topic, “Hans Castorp’s military cousin had been a ‘zealot’ - as a melancholic show-off once said - and that had led to a fatal outcome. Might we perhaps find some excuse for our young hero’s behaviour in assuming that such an outcome encouraged him in his disgraceful management of time, in his wicked dawdling with eternity?” (p649). I must say I found this passage hard to comprehend, does this even make sense? How do you dawdle in eternity? Everything is done and not done already! Whatever the actual meaning, it is one of the more impassioned passages that we hear from the narrator and seems to conflict with my broadly positive view of Hans’ philosophising about time.
The two characters of Settembrini and Naphta I’ll take together as a pair even though there is far more material on Settembrini and he features in the story from a far earlier stage. Once again, the feeling that these two are representative of larger themes, nations or events was inescapable. Clearly and explicitly, Settembrini symbolises liberalism and rationality as he declares himself on almost every occasion when he speaks. Against this stands Naphta, representative of religion and, perhaps, more specifically Catholicism. In an age when science and religion vied for preeminence in their ability to explain and guide life for humans, this much symbolic significance seems immediately and readily comprehensible. The two indulge in truly epic dialectics while a small audience of Hans, Joachim and a few others from the sanatorium watch and listen. While I have said that the broad strokes of the pair’s symbolism seems simple enough, the same certainly cannot be said for the minutiae of their debates. These are detailed at some length and were largely too arcane for me to understand fully. The subjects discussed ranged from morality to metaphysics to religion to economics. Many of the references were well beyond my ken but from what I could decipher Settembrini opposes his belief in rationality and the pursuit of earthly, empirical happiness against Naphta’s preference for spirituality, faith and belief in God rather than pursuit of any objective, scientific truth. The book contains page upon page of their debates and I couldn’t possibly hope to summarise their content. However, this passage may give a flavour, albeit brief, of Naphta’s attacks on rationality and intellectualism, “Saint Augustine’s statement: ‘I believe, that I may understand’ - is absolutely incontrovertible. Faith is the vehicle of understanding, the intellect is secondary. Your unbiased science is a myth. Faith, a world view, an idea - in short, the will - is always present, and it is then reason’s task to examine and prove it. In the end we always come down to ‘quod erat demonstrandum.’ The very notion of proof contains, psychologically speaking, a strong voluntaristic element.’ (p471). Even Mann seems to be aware of the overwhelming nature of the discussions between the two writing, “The two intellectual adversaries could engage in constant duels - and we could not hope to present them in their entirety without fear of likewise losing ourselves in the same desperate infinitude into which they daily threw themselves for their large audience” (p600). Despite Mann’s claim to have abridged and abbreviated, the polemics that he does reproduce are lengthy and confusing. Perhaps my feelings can best be summarised by Hans’ comment on p458 to his cousin Joachim, “I was paying attention, you see, but none of it was clear. Instead, the more they talked the more confused I got.” On the whole, I found the chapter ‘Someone Else’ to be confusing, high falutin and boring and Hans’ comments, which come at the chapter’s end, are probably the only truly easily comprehensible part!! The chapter appears to me as an intellectual version of the snowstorm whereby readers become disoriented and lost in the blizzard of point and and counterpoint. Given Hans’ reflections on these two characters after his experience in the storm, I feel it is justified to see some connection between the two. While I will write more about the storm later, it is also worth considering the ultimate fate of these two adversaries in the story. The two intellectuals eventually decide to settle their differences in a duel, which seems very out of character for both of them. However, at the crucial moment, Settembrini fires in the air and Naphta shoots himself in the head after calling Settembrini a coward. This may demonstrate some of Naphta’s religious convictions although I think I am correct in believing that suicide is also a sin within Catholicism so it is unclear to me what the Jesuit Naphta hopes to achieve by this act. To me, the more powerful message was that human differences can never be reconciled and will inevitably result in a violent and unhappy end.
From the outset, Settembrini is the more attractive of the two characters. He cuts an eccentric and endearing figure; full of intelligence and learning. He seems to bear his serious illness with stoicism and his shabby, unchanging clothing portrayed an admirable preference for learning above material goods, which I liked. He is witty and amusing in conversation with Hans and his cousin and also seems wise and humble. Hans sees him as guide and I was immediately struck by his seemingly sage advice to him to pack his bags and leave the sanatorium on the first day. He makes astute observations that amuse the cousins, mocks the sanatorium and appears to be one of the only patients capable of an independent perspective. He also corrects Hans’ philosophical errors; for example, warning against his reverence for illness and death, which seems sensible. He is also hawkish on the prospect of war from very early on, adding to the impression that he is, in some sense, prophetic. Later on in the book, things begin to seem a little less clear cut. In some senses, it seems necessary for Hans to stay at the sanatorium for a long time in order for him to have his epiphany. Viewed in this way, Settembrini’s desire for him to leave is less unequivocally positive. Indeed, my initial conception of Settembrini as a omniscient sage becomes less and less tenable as the book goes on. That said, it is Settembrini who helps Hans to accomplish his illicit skiing by helping to hide the equipment at the house he shares with Naphta so perhaps, in this indirect way, he can be seen as playing a role in Hans’ experience in the snowstorm and his subsequent return to the flat lands. Against that, it’s not altogether clear to me that Hans’ return is viewed as any better, morally or otherwise, than his time up the mountain. Intuitively, I had a slight preference for seeing him return to a more active, engaged existence with the world but if asked to support this philosophically I don’t think it would be the easiest case to make. The narrator doesn’t seem to speak definitively on the subject either. The passage that mentions Hans’ ‘wicked dawdling’ on p649 seems to be the as close as it gets to an outright condemnation of his conduct and even this passage is ambiguous. Settembrini is an explicit critic of Hans’ choice to stay up in the mountain but given his ambivalent status in the novel, it’s hard to see this as of any central importance. Naphta is a far less appealing character for me. His hardline, unswerving attitude leads him to endorse horrific historical events like the Spanish Inquisition. His militant Christianity and predilection for finery in his clothing and decoration of his house make uneasy bedfellows. He doesn’t seem to be living a very Christian life, if Jesus’ life is taken to be the exemplar, and I found him suspicious and creepy as a character. That said, he does make some valid criticisms of Settembrini and, in the final analysis, his devotion to his own Catholic ideas is no more or less valid than Settembrini’s fixation with rationalism. Equally, Settembrini’s liberalism doesn’t sit very well with his Freemasonry so both are, in some sense, flawed and alloyed characters. Settembrini also entertains ridiculous notions of the power that rationality and intellectualism hold. For instance, he tells Naphta he could cure a madman by looking into his eyes and hopes to eradicate human suffering by detailing every instance of it in an encyclopedia, which are both fanciful.
Naphta’s critique of science is especially memorable and returns to the problematic nature of time and infinity, which is a recurring theme in the book, “It was faith like any other, only worse and more obtuse than all the rest; and the word ‘science’ itself was the expression of the most stupid sort of realism, which did not blush at taking at face value the dubious reflections that objects left on the human mind and seeing them as the basis for the most dismal and vapid dogma anyone ever foisted on humanity. Was not the very idea of a world of senses that existed in and of itself the most ridiculous of all possible self-contradictions? But as a dogma, modern natural science lived exclusively and solely from the metaphysical assumption that the forms by which we recognise and organise reality - space, time, causality - reflect a real state of affairs existing independent of our knowledge. That monistic claim was the most naked piece of effrontery the Spirit had ever had to endure….The theory of infinite space and time - that was definitely based on experience, was it?...For the simple reason that in relation to infinity any given unit of mass approached zero. There was no size in infinity, and no duration or change in eternity, either. In infinite space, given that every distance is the mathematical equivalent of zero, there could be no two adjacent points, let alone a body, let alone movement.” (pp824-5)
Settembrini also appears to be a racist character as evidenced by several passages in the book. In Chapter 5, he links weakness and time wasting with being Asian, by which he mainly seems to mean Russian in this context. He has done this before when he argues that librality and reason are Western ideas that must be spread across the world. This is clearly racist although a more charitable interpretation might see him as encouraging Hans to live in accordance with his nature. He also places the mind above the body and champions reason above all (pp281-299). Within this section, when speaking about Asians and “Mongolian Muscovites” he says: “Do not model yourself on them, do not let them infect you with their ideas, but instead compare your own nature, your higher nature to theirs, and as a son of the West, of the divine West, hold sacred those things that both by nature and heritage are sacred to you. Time, for instance. This liberality, this barbaric extravagance in the use of time is the Asian style - that may be the reason why the children of the East feel so at home here.” (p289). This seems unequivocally racist to me and confirms that Settembrini sees his beloved rationality as a solely European trait. Rather more obliquely, Settembrini also seems to criticise Hans’ triste with Clavida along racial lines saying, “The gods and mortals have on occasion visited the realm of shades and found their way back. But those who reside in the nether world know that he who eats of the fruits of their realm is forever theirs” (p421). It may be possible to argue that this passage is an allegorical representation but I rather doubt this. Clavdia is presented as a patient much like all the others and so I see no need for the divisive language, which, to me, seems to guided by demarcations of race. Furthermore, his preference for mind above body seems to reach unusual, and perhaps unnatural, heights when he says, “But there is one force, one principle that is the object of my highest affirmation, my highest and ultimate respect and love, and that force, that principle, is the mind. However much I detest seeing that dubious construct of moonshine and cobwebs that goes by the name of ‘soul’ played off against the body, within the antithesis of the body and mind, it is the body that is the evil, devilish principle, because the body is nature, and nature - as an opposing force, I repeat, to mind, to reason - is evil, mystical and evil...You see, my good engineer, there you behold the mind’s great enmity toward nature, its proud mistrust of her, its greathearted insistence on the right to criticise her and her evil, irrational power.” And later on, still speaking about the body, “One must respect and defend it, when it serves the cause of emancipation and beauty, of freedom of the senses, of happiness and desire. One must despise it insofar as it is the principle of gravity and inertia opposing the flow toward the light, insofar as it represents the principle of disease and death, insofar as its quintessence is a matter of perversity, of corruption, of lust and disgrace.” (pp296-8). All of these factors combine to undermine the earlier, more positive, conception of Settembrini as a fair minded sage. After all, he seems to be a crackpot extremist obsessed with reason, which he sees as exclusive to Europeans thus placing them above all other races.
The two most striking parts of the book, for me, were the snowstorm, which appears to be an obvious centre piece and turning point for Hans where he has his epiphany-dream, and the appearance of the character Mynheer Peeperkorn at the sanatorium. Both seem to show a break with what has gone before and serve to reinvigorate Hans and shake him out of his timeless, stagnant state of torpor.
The storm is wonderfully well written and vividly realised. Amidst the total confusion and hostility of the storm the prospects of Hans’ survival look slim. However, just as Hans seems resigned to death when he falls asleep against the side of a hut up in the mountains he awakens to find the storm passed and his senses once again able to guide him. In a similar and parallel way, Hans epiphany allows him to see through the blizzard conditions of Naphta and Settembrini’s arguments and their myopic obsessions with their ways of interpreting the world. He emerges revivified and newly capable of seeing his way in the world; something he seemed totally incapable of before. The dream itself is strange and involves a sunny utopia where people are kind to one another. However, behind this loving community lies a temple where babies are sacrificed by two witches. On awakening he wonders, “Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror? What a fine and gallant conclusion for them to draw! I shall hold to their side, here in my soul, and not with Naphta, or for that matter with Settembrini - they’re both windbags. The one is voluptuous and malicious, and the other is forever tooting his little horn of reason and even imagines he can stare madmen back to sanity - how preposterous, how philistine!” (p587). Here, I see Hans as emerging from his somewhat dejected period of isolation at the sanatorium and finding a new way of understanding the world. For example, with unusual certainty and a kind of new found confidence that isn’t derived from listening to someone else’s theories, “Love stands opposed to death - it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love and not reason, yields to kind thoughts…..My heart is beating strong and knows why. It beats not for purely physical reasons, the way fingernails grow on a corpse. It beats for human reasons and because my spirit is truly happy.” (p588). This appeal to love and feeling circumvents both Settembrini’s fixation with reason, which it clearly renounces, but also Naphta’s worldview with its preoccupation with religious doctrine. In spite of this seemingly rosy outcome, there remains a dark side to Hans vision. The sacrifice of babies taking place, and perhaps even underpinning the civil behaviour of the ‘sunny folk’, seems to represent an avoidable violence and cruelty in the world against which humans may choose to react with love. In the same way that Naphta and Settembrini eventually descend into a duel, albeit an unusual one, Mann seems to be pointing out that violence and death are, unavoidably, the ways of the world irrespective of how much love the human spirit can find within itself. While this recognition is depressing, it also seems undeniably true.
Mynheer Peeperkorn bursts onto the scene late in the book as Clavdia’s new lover. Strangely, Hans doesn’t seem to feel any jealousy at all towards him, which strikes me as quite improbable if we take Hans’ own professions of love to Clavdia at face value. I suppose it is possible that Clavdia was always an excuse to stay up the mountain, as I wrote about earlier, and after his experience in the snowstorm he no longer feels the need to stay up in the mountains and, therefore, no longer needs her as an excuse to do so. Another unusual aspect of Clavdia and Mynheer’s relationship, as it relates to Hans, is the fact that both solicit his partnership in ‘alliances’ for the benefit of the other. Both also make a point of saying that such alliances are usually formed against a third party rather than for them, as is the case here. Once again, I suspected that this was allegorical insofar as many countries surely formed alliances, or at the least sought them, in the run up to the First World War. However, with no easy knowledge of which nations are represented by these characters I can’t take this line of thought any further. Suffice to say it is unusual and unrealistic, to me, that Hans is so well disposed towards the lovers given his own apparent love for Clavdia. Mynheer is totally different from the other characters that Hans looks to for guidance. He makes no appeal to intellectualism, unlike Naphta and Settembrini, but is effortlessly more persuasive and magnetic than both. He is referred to as ‘a personality’ constantly in the text and brings everyone at the sanatorium under his influence by the force of this personality alone. He barely says anything, speaking in meaningless fragments but can command the entire population enticing them into late night binges and trips to the waterfalls. At his appearance, the book takes a turn for the better leaving behind the boring, confusing dialectics of Naphta and Settembrini and bringing instead highly entertaining scenes of his freewheeling and bacchanalian charm. He draws everyone’s attention, especially Hans’, with his lavish consumption and charisma. This is very well illustrated in the way that he takes the attention away from one of their neverending arguments by looking at an eagle in the sky. Settembrini criticises Hans for being swayed by popularity and aesthetics but there seems to be more to Peeperkorn, encapsulated in his exhortations to ‘feel’. However, if there is more to Peeperkorn, and my feeling is there was, it is never really quantified and is only hinted at via the huge effect he has on the people around him. This way of experiencing life, and above all feeling it, seems to be set against Settembrini’s appeal to reason and Naptha’s appeal to religion. Nonetheless, Peeperkorn ends up drinking himself to death and it was never clear to me exactly what effect he had had on Hans. Perhaps my best guess is that his character represents how important it is to be active and enjoy life, regardless of the ultimate consequences, which in this case appear to be death. Against this, he is already quite elderly when he arrives at the sanatorium so perhaps there is no greater significance to his death. In some senses he is a positive example and a breath of fresh air, both in the novel and at the sanatorium, but in another it’s hard to point to any definite philosophical positives that he embodies beyond his ability to have fun and connect with people in spite of his basic inability to say anything! He feels highly significant as a character but when I try to pin down this significance he seems to come out as a thoughtless hedonist. The only passage in which he is more coherent relates to the theme of feeling and this may signal its potential importance to understanding his role in the book, “I repeat, that it is our duty, our religious duty to feel. Our feeling, you see, is our manly vigour, which awakens life. Life slumbers. It wants to be awakened, roused to drunken nuptials with divine feeling. Because feeling, young man, is divine. Man himself is divine in that he feels. He is the very feeling of God. God created him in order to feel through him. Man is nothing more than the organ by which God consummates His marriage with awakened and intoxicated life. And if man fails to feel, it is an eruption of divine disgrace, it is the defeat of God’s manly vigour, a cosmic catastrophe, a horror that never leaves the mind” (p717).
One thing that was really brilliant and memorable was Mann’s writing of Peeperkorn’s dialogue. He is a hugely engaging ‘personality’ for the reader, just as he is for Hans and the other patients. Right from the start he is an imposing, exotic and majestic figure physically. He is also wonderfully and appropriately named for a Dutch-Indonesian spice magnate. His manner of speech is fantastic and spectacularly well written, for example, “In a rather low voice, he said, ‘Ladies and gentleman. Fine. How very fine. That set-tles it. And yet you must keep in mind and never - not for a moment - lose sight of the fact that - but enough on that topic. What is incumbent upon me to say is not so much that, but primarily and above all this: that we are duty-bound, that we are charged with an inviolable - I repeat with all due emphasis - inviolable obligation - No! No, ladies and gentlemen, not that I - oh, how very mistaken it would be to think that I - but that set-tles it, ladies and gentlemen. Settles it completely. I know we are all of one mind, and so then, to the point!” (p653). And again a little later, “‘Splendid!’ Peeperkorn cried, throwing himself against the back of his chair an stretching one arm out to the dwarf. The tone of his cry seemed to say, ‘Well, who could object to that! It’s all so wonderful!’ - ‘My child,’ he continued now in an earnest, almost stern voice, ‘that exceeds my every expectation. Emerentia - you pronounce it with modesty, but the name - and taken together with your person - in short, it reveals the loveliest possibilities. ‘Tis well worth musing upon, giving rein to all the emotions that well up in one’s chest, so that one may - but as a nickname, you must understand, my child, as a nickname - it might be Rentia, or even Emchen would cheer the heart - but for the moment I shall without hesitation hold fast to Emchen. So then, Emchen my child, listen well: a little bread, my dear. Wait! Stay! Let there be no misunderstanding. I can read from your relatively broad face that there is the danger of - bread, Renzchen, but not baked bread, of that we have a sufficiency, in all shapes and sizes. Not baked, but distilled, my angel. The bread of God, clear as crystal, my little Nickname, that we may be regaled. I am uncertain whether what I intend by using that term - I might suggest ‘a cordial for the heart’ as an alternative, if that term did not likewise run the danger of being taken in a more common, thoughtless sense - but that set-tles it, Rentia. Settles it, over and done! Or rather, in light of our duty, our holy obligation - for example, the debt of honour incumbent upon me to turn with a most cordial heart to you, so small but full of character - a gin, my love! To gladden my heart, might I say. A gin, a Schiedam gin, my Emerenzchen. Make haste to bring it to me.” (pp654-655). This whole vivacious, fragementory monologue achieves the same as ‘A gin, please’ but also so much more! His character is very well drawn even if his ultimate significance is somewhat more enigmatic.
The book ends with Hans returning to the flatlands to fight in World War I. The final scenes see him in battle, watched by the narrator. I was disappointed that there wasn’t more detail or information on what occasioned this sudden change of heart in Hans. The advent of WW1 is described as a ‘thunderbolt’ for him but we learn little or nothing of the details of his mental or psychological state around this time. The death of his cousin and his uncle, Counsol Tieppenel, who acted as his father after his parents died cannot tempt him down to the world below, in spite of his obsession with death and love of funerals, but the prospect of a bloody war can. I suppose it could be argued that war holds the promise of death on a far grander scale. This is odd and, again, seems to describe violence and war as an unavoidable and natural part of the human condition, indeed, something necessary. The fact that Settembrini and Naphta eventually descend into violence, after all their scholarly discussion, seems to have some parallel in Hans’ years of reflection finally ending in him descending to join the war. Seeing Hans on the battlefield after years of rest cures and ‘playing king’ up the mountain is both invigorating and horrible. The narrator says of the young men going into battle, “That they do it with joy, and also with boundless fear and an unutterable longing for home, is both shameful and sublime, but surely no reason to bring them here to this.” (p852). This ending seems to suggest that violence and death are in some way part of the natural order that will eventually give the foundation for fresh life and love, which is also hinted at in the dream Hans has in the snowstorm.
I found this book enigmatic and confusing. Some of it is beautifully written. For instance: Hans’ journey up into the mountain, the early parts of Settembrini’s character, the snowstorm, the discussion Hans has with Behrens about cigars (p310), certain passages reflecting on the nature of time and the character and monologues of Mynheer Peeperkorn. However, other parts are boring, long winded, arcane or all three. For example, the lengthy sections on biology in ‘Research’, the seemingly never ending, abstruse debates between Settembrini and Naphta in ‘Someone Else’ and the uncertain status of Behrens, the sanatorium and his treatments. I was often left feeling like there was some greater significance that I hadn’t grasped. In the end, I started to feel like the book just isn’t very clear about the points it wants to make and for this reason I found it difficult to enjoy as a whole. Some parts are wonderful but others are boring and soporific and by the end I felt like I hadn’t really understood why this is considered to be such a classic. It deals with weighty subjects but isn’t a philosophical treatise, it has some great characters, events and dialogues but overall isn’t an amazing story and so I ended up feeling like it is a rather confusing and unsatisfactory mixture of the two. It was an interesting and thought provoking book full of ideas and had several highly enjoyable sections but my failure to find sufficient unity in the whole left me feeling a bit disappointed with it.
Tuesday, 20 March 2018
J.L. Borges - The Perpetual Race of Achilles and The Tortoise (Penguin Great Ideas #98)
It would be inappropriate to write a verbose review of a collection of works by an author who says so much with such incredible economy. Sadly, I have erred in this regard and the evidence of my indiscretions can be found below as not-so-brief reflections on, and quotations from, the 18 essays contained in this volume. However, as an attempt to atone for my transgressions against brevity, I’ll attempt to say something more succinct. The individual notes are included more for my own reference.
First, a word about the book itself. Its contents are largely good and interesting. Borges explores ideas of extraordinary depth in a few pages, or even paragraphs. He expounds fascinating histories and hypotheses giving original and intriguing glosses and interpretations of his own. However, two of the essays baffle me by their selection for a book like this. Namely, The Translators of One Thousand and One Nights and The Innocence of Layamon. Both deal with recondite subjects and indulge in highly esoteric discourse on arcane aspects of the, already abstruse, material. I felt them to be inappropriate choices for a book of a more generalist character. Overall though, I thought 10 or 11 of the essays were good and probably 8 or 9 were really excellent in terms of the ideas they contained. It’s magical, and can be overwhelming, to be plunged into such new and vast ideas with such rapidity!
While Borges has an undoubted, and much vaunted, talent for expressing complex metaphysical ideas in pithy prose I felt that this can sometimes lead to grandiose generalisations and overstatement. To be sure, it may be my own understanding that is deficient and it is also true that a person can’t write in a style that is at once epigrammatic and exhaustive. In spite of this, I sometimes felt like Borges rushes to overreaching opinions and ends up sounding arrogant. For example, when Borges pontificates “Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth” it seems overblown and grandiloquent and appears to suppose that the author has seen every other film worthy of consideration.
The other problem I had relates to Borges’ love of metaphysics and magic. Again, his ability to draw out absorbing metaphysical reflections is one of the things I love about his writing so in making this criticism I am partly attacking what I like about his writing. However, as with the grandiose statements I take issue with above; sometimes I feel he goes to far. Essays like A Defense Of Basilides The False or The Perpetual Race of Achilles and The Tortoise show this predilection for metaphysical cogitation in the best light. But essays like The Wall and Books and Coleridge’s Dream seem to show an overzealous desire to interpret in a mythical manner when the facts don’t demand it; or a preference for a mysterious explanation when a more obvious, albeit unremarkable, one would do just as well. It’s strange that the same author who deals so masterfully with largely empirical information in an essay like The Enigma Of Shakespeare can be drawn into what I see as such facile, extraneous philosophising in the two essays I mention in a negative context above. As I write this I realise there are other examples where I am delighted by his metaphysical reflections on situations that are otherwise taken to be empirical. I suppose it is a matter of degree and how interesting I feel the ideas that emerge from the metaphysical hypothesising are.
In the main, it was a thought provoking read full of captivating and novel ideas and complex, pithy perspectives.
1. The Perpetual Race of Achilles and The Tortoise - good, complex
Head scratching and mind exploding examination of Zeno’s classic paradox and some responses to it.
“The precise quantity of points in the universe is the same as in a meter of the universe, or in a decimeter, or in the deepest trajectory of a star.”
“The paradox of Zeno of Elea, as James indicated, is an attempt upon not only the reality of space but the more invulnerable and sheer reality of time. I might add that existence in a physical body, immobile impermanence, the flow of an afternoon in life, are challenged by such an adventure. Such a deconstruction, by means of only one word, infinite, a worrisome word (and then a concept) we have engendered fearlessly, once it besets our thinking, explodes and annihilates it.”
2. The Duration of Hell - good, concise and well argued
Concise and capable criticism of the traditional Christian concept of Hell.
3. A Defense Of Basilides The False - good, interesting ideas
Details an alternative Christian cosmogony whereby the original God created a Heaven ruled over by seven subordinate divinities. These subordinates then replicated this by creating, another God, another Heaven and another seven subordinates. All at one further remove from God and so on through 365 iterations. The 365th Lord of the lowest Heaven and his subordinates created Earth, Man etc.
“Our rash or guilty improvisation out of unproductive matter by a deficient divinity.”
If this cosmogony was widely accepted like the current Christian one is, “Lines such as Novalis’ ‘Life is sickness of the spirit,’ or Rimbaud’s despairing ‘True life is absent; we are not in the world,’ would fulminate from the canonical books.
“In any case, what better gift can we hope for than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God than to be absolved of the world?”
4. The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights - bad, boring, arcane
Discussion of the various pros and cons of different translations of this famous Arab book. Presented in floral, somewhat abstruse, language when a tighter and less delphic style would be more agreeable on such an idiosyncratic subject.
Also, are we really to believe JLB read several editions of this voluminous book, including footnotes, in English and three MORE in German!?!
5. The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton - mediocre
Essay on the detective story and its various rules and examples thereof
6. Two Films (Crime and Punishment and The Thirty-Nine Steps) - mediocre
Essay about how von Sternberg’s film version of Crime and Punishment doesn’t do it justice and how Hitchcock’s version of The Thirty-Nine Steps turns ‘an absolutely dull adventure story’ into a good film.
7. Joyce’s Latest Novel - good, but hard to judge having not read Finnegans Wake!
Critiques Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for being too oblique and for some of his word creation while also recognising his talent as a writer in other works.
8. A Pedagogy of Hatred - good
Criticism of an anti-Semitic German textbook used in schools written in 1937. Prescient.
9. A Comment on August 23, 1944. Good, interesting ideas about the nature of Nazism.
Reflections on this day in WW2 from his perspective, as an Allied supporter, and his reactions to Nazi supporting friends in Argentina.
“They are fickle, and by behaving incoherently they are no longer aware that incoherence need be justified. They adore the German race, but they abhor ‘Saxon’ America; they condemn the articles of Versailles, but they applaud the wonders of the Blitzkrieg; they are anti-Semitic, but they profess a religion of Hebrew origin; they celebrate submarine warfare, but they vigorously condemn British acts of piracy; they denounce imperialism, but they defend and proclaim the theory of Lebensraum [‘living space’, German expansionism]; they idolise San Martin, but they regard the independence of America as a mistake; they apply the canon of Jesus to the actions of England, but the canon of Zarathustra to those of Germany.”
“For Europeans and Americans, one order and only one is possible; it used to be called Rome, and now it is called Western Culture. To be a Nazi (to play the energetic barbarian, Viking, Tartar, 16th century conquistador, gaucho, or Indian) is, after all, mentally and morally impossible. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have know that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.”
10. On William Beckford’s Vathek - good, interesting reflections on the nature of Hell as JLB perceives it in this book
“So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasising different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realised that the protagonist was the same.”
JLB reflects on Hell as a place of unknown and unknowable psychological confusion, not simply a place where the horrors we know on earth are magnified (cf. Dante). He describes it as ‘uncanny’ and sees it as having an inscrutable and unfathomable quality. This is the same description that we find in the postscript to Essay 2 (The Duration of Hell*). As with some descriptions of Heaven in the Bible, it is totally and utterly other wordly and defies conception by earthly beings such as ourselves. JLB seems to suggest it can only be glimpsed in the senseless unreality and panic of nightmares.
*”I dreamed I was awakening from another dream - an uproar of chaos and cataclysms - into an unrecognisable room. Day was dawning: light suffused the room, outlining the foot of the wrought-iron bed, the upright chair, the closed door and windows, the bare table. I thought fearfully, ‘Where am I?’ and I realised I didn’t know. I thought ‘Who am I?’ and I couldn’t recognise myself. My fear grew. I thought: This desolate awakening is in Hell, this eternal vigil will be my destiny. Then I really woke up trembling.”
11. An Overwhelming Film - mixed but largely good, interesting ideas with some grandiose statements
There is a huge amount expressed incredibly concisely in this review of Citizen Kane, which is no more than 500 words long. JLB describes two plots; one, ‘pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits’. The other, ‘ a kind of metaphysical detective story, its subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought’. This idea that every man’s life is fragmentary and incongruous is a powerful one and is repeated elsewhere in this collection of essays (cf. #10). JLB sees the second plot as a collection of fragments from Kane’s life, who is representative of everyone, and invites the viewer to interpret them, or reconstruct them coherently, himself; an impossible task.
“No man knows who he is, no man is anyone” seems essentially correct to me and reminds me of Tolstoy’s determinism in W&P.
However, statements like “Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth” seem overblown and grandiloquent.
The assessment that it is a work of genius that will endure but not be rewatched very much seems prescient to me, but this is a wholly personal perspective and one I may revise if I watch it again!
12. Our Poor Individualism - good, by necessity a generalisation, but draws interesting ideas out from it
Essay on how the Argentine character is essentially different from the European or North American one in terms of interaction, or identification, with the state. While cultural ‘Westerners’, according to JLB, see themselves as existing within a meaningful and logical cosmos; Argentinians see only chaos. This may derive from the efficacy of the respective governments but the effect is that while Westerners ‘believe’ in the order and abstract justice of the state; Argentinians do not. At present, JLB concedes that this has largely negative consequences (e.g. corruption and theft from public coffers), but he conjectures that in an era where the most urgent problem is ‘the gradual interference of the State in the acts of the individual’ that this primacy of individual may yet prove valuable. He also notes the affinity between Argentine and Spanish culture; seemingly presuming a common heritage in pre-colonial Spain for some of these characteristics.
“The State is impersonal; the Argentine can only conceive of personal relations. Therefore, to him, robbing public funds is not a crime.”
“He feels with Don Quixote that, ‘everybody hath sins of his own to answer for’ and that ‘it is not seemly, that honest men should be the executioners of their fellow creatures, on account of matters with which they have no concern’” (Both quotes Quixote I, XXII)
13. On Oscar Wilde - mediocre, perhaps because of the limited amount of Wilde I have read
JLB argues that Wilde is often misconceived as a complex and experimental author because of his own success. People attribute phrases to him unjustly and overlook the readable, simple character of his prose. Also praises him highly as a bastion of innocence, enjoyment and fun.
14. The Wall and Books - mediocre to bad
JLB reflects on two of the most famous actions of Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti: the construction of the Great Wall and the destruction of all books in his kingdom that predated his rule. The second of these acts is disputed. JLB, ever keen to interrogate the nature of time and history, proposes a few deeper, metaphysical motivations for what appear prima facie to be political actions aimed at the preservation of power. None are especially convincing but some are quite interesting.
15. The Innocence of Layamon - bad
Arcane discussion of an arcane book
16. Coleridge’s Dream - mediocre, interesting history but unlikely conclusion
Explanation of how Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’ came to him in a dream and brief examination of other works of art that have oneiric inspiration. JLB notes that Kubla Khan’s own inspiration to build his palace came to him as a dream in the 13th century, some 500 years before Coleridge’s poem. Despite claiming to be someone who always tries to disbelieve the supernatural, JLB goes on to argue that these two events are cosmically linked; “an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object...is gradually entering the world”. I’d be more inclined to believe that Coleridge somehow had knowledge of Kubla Khan’s dream-inspired palace. A thesis JLB posits, then rejects in favour of his supernatural, eternal archetype! This magical explanation could have been better supported by an examination of the similarities between the poem and the palace. However, given the magical topography of the poem I doubt this would have strengthened JLB’s position and this may be why he excludes it. An interesting brief history with a fanciful, albeit attractive, conclusion.
17. The Enigma Of Shakespeare - good, informative and interesting
The enigma of Shakespeare is that a man with a grammar school education and only a little knowledge of Latin and Greek could write such universally admired, complex plays. Another facet of the enigma is that he sold his theatre and stopped writing a few years before his death. JLB examines the theory that the author of the plays was in fact Francis Bacon, who demurred to be named as their author because the lowly status of playwrights conflicted with his political ambitions. He rejects this on stylistic and linguistic grounds. He gives more credence to the theory that Christopher Marlowe may have written the plays, identifying his style as far more commensurate with the genius of Shakespeare. Historically, he may have faked his death at 29 and moved to Scotland, sending the plays to Shakespeare to publish for him. Ultimately, JLB rejects both of these theories and concludes that Shakespeare himself was the author of his works despite his relative lack of education. As for the mystery of his abandoning writing, JLB claims he wrote primarily to be performed and that his desire to write may have waned, and eventually died, alongside the actors for whom he was writing.
Opposing Shakespeare’s style to Bacon’s in refutation of theory that Bacon wrote many of Shakespeare’s plays, “Shakespeare, on the contrary, had, as we know, a profound feeling for the English language, which is perhaps unique among Western languages in its possession of what might be called a double register. For common words, for the ideas, say of a child, a rustic, a sailor, or a peasant, it has words of Saxon origin, and for intellectual matters it has words derived from Latin. These words are never precisely synonymous, there is always a nuance of differentiation: it is one thing to say, Saxonly, ‘dark’ and another to say ‘obscure’; one thing to say ‘brotherhood’ and another to say ‘fraternity’; one thing - especially for poetry, which depends not only on atmosphere and on meaning but on the connotations of the atmosphere of words to say, Latinly, ‘unique’ and another to say ‘single.’”
“Coleridge used Spinoza’s vocabulary in praise of Shakespeare. He said that Shakespeare was what Spinoza calls ‘natura naturans,’ creative nature: the force that takes all forms, that lies as if dead in rocks, that sleeps in plants, that dreams in the lives of animals, which are conscious only of the present moment, and that reaches its consciousness, or a certain consciousness in us, in mankind, the ‘natura naturans.’
18. Blindness - good, interesting perspectives and admirable bravery and philosophy in the face of adversity
Borges writes about the experience of being blind and the cruel irony of losing the ability to read and write at the same time as being appointed the Director of The National Library of Argentina. He also answers a question I have been pondering, sporadically and idly, for around 25 years! I remember attending a talk at primary school aged 6 or 7. The talk was to be given by a blind person and we were asked to think of some questions to ask at the end. I remember fervently conferring with my classmates about what a blind person actually ‘saw’; was it blackness? Was it nothingness? If it was nothingness, couldn’t they see through it? My juvenile mind became excited about the answer. However, when the time came to ask and I put my question to the blind person, the response was simply, ‘nothing’. I felt disappointed and frustrated and asked if it was nothing as in blackness. The blind person explained he couldn’t see colours and moved on to the next question dismissively. Perhaps he had been blind since birth and couldn’t understand the question I was attempting to ask; perhaps he didn’t think about it in the same terms as I was asking. Nonetheless, I felt like I knew nothing more about what a blind person experienced visually and was sad; perhaps in part because I thought it was a good question and it had seemingly proved to be the very opposite! To my delight, when reading this essay, I discovered:
“One of the colours that the blind - or at least this blind man - do not see is black; another is red...I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind.”
Why does JLB only invite his female students to study Anglo Saxon with him? Womanizer?
Interesting to note that he is blind given the book also contains film reviews although perhaps they predate his blindness.
“Now I know that shyness is one of the evils one must try to overcome, that in reality to be shy doesn’t matter - it is like so many other things to which one gives exaggerated importance.”
“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so” - JLB credits his blindness with opening new avenues of learning (Swedish, Anglo Saxon, etc.)
First, a word about the book itself. Its contents are largely good and interesting. Borges explores ideas of extraordinary depth in a few pages, or even paragraphs. He expounds fascinating histories and hypotheses giving original and intriguing glosses and interpretations of his own. However, two of the essays baffle me by their selection for a book like this. Namely, The Translators of One Thousand and One Nights and The Innocence of Layamon. Both deal with recondite subjects and indulge in highly esoteric discourse on arcane aspects of the, already abstruse, material. I felt them to be inappropriate choices for a book of a more generalist character. Overall though, I thought 10 or 11 of the essays were good and probably 8 or 9 were really excellent in terms of the ideas they contained. It’s magical, and can be overwhelming, to be plunged into such new and vast ideas with such rapidity!
While Borges has an undoubted, and much vaunted, talent for expressing complex metaphysical ideas in pithy prose I felt that this can sometimes lead to grandiose generalisations and overstatement. To be sure, it may be my own understanding that is deficient and it is also true that a person can’t write in a style that is at once epigrammatic and exhaustive. In spite of this, I sometimes felt like Borges rushes to overreaching opinions and ends up sounding arrogant. For example, when Borges pontificates “Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth” it seems overblown and grandiloquent and appears to suppose that the author has seen every other film worthy of consideration.
The other problem I had relates to Borges’ love of metaphysics and magic. Again, his ability to draw out absorbing metaphysical reflections is one of the things I love about his writing so in making this criticism I am partly attacking what I like about his writing. However, as with the grandiose statements I take issue with above; sometimes I feel he goes to far. Essays like A Defense Of Basilides The False or The Perpetual Race of Achilles and The Tortoise show this predilection for metaphysical cogitation in the best light. But essays like The Wall and Books and Coleridge’s Dream seem to show an overzealous desire to interpret in a mythical manner when the facts don’t demand it; or a preference for a mysterious explanation when a more obvious, albeit unremarkable, one would do just as well. It’s strange that the same author who deals so masterfully with largely empirical information in an essay like The Enigma Of Shakespeare can be drawn into what I see as such facile, extraneous philosophising in the two essays I mention in a negative context above. As I write this I realise there are other examples where I am delighted by his metaphysical reflections on situations that are otherwise taken to be empirical. I suppose it is a matter of degree and how interesting I feel the ideas that emerge from the metaphysical hypothesising are.
In the main, it was a thought provoking read full of captivating and novel ideas and complex, pithy perspectives.
1. The Perpetual Race of Achilles and The Tortoise - good, complex
Head scratching and mind exploding examination of Zeno’s classic paradox and some responses to it.
“The precise quantity of points in the universe is the same as in a meter of the universe, or in a decimeter, or in the deepest trajectory of a star.”
“The paradox of Zeno of Elea, as James indicated, is an attempt upon not only the reality of space but the more invulnerable and sheer reality of time. I might add that existence in a physical body, immobile impermanence, the flow of an afternoon in life, are challenged by such an adventure. Such a deconstruction, by means of only one word, infinite, a worrisome word (and then a concept) we have engendered fearlessly, once it besets our thinking, explodes and annihilates it.”
2. The Duration of Hell - good, concise and well argued
Concise and capable criticism of the traditional Christian concept of Hell.
3. A Defense Of Basilides The False - good, interesting ideas
Details an alternative Christian cosmogony whereby the original God created a Heaven ruled over by seven subordinate divinities. These subordinates then replicated this by creating, another God, another Heaven and another seven subordinates. All at one further remove from God and so on through 365 iterations. The 365th Lord of the lowest Heaven and his subordinates created Earth, Man etc.
“Our rash or guilty improvisation out of unproductive matter by a deficient divinity.”
If this cosmogony was widely accepted like the current Christian one is, “Lines such as Novalis’ ‘Life is sickness of the spirit,’ or Rimbaud’s despairing ‘True life is absent; we are not in the world,’ would fulminate from the canonical books.
“In any case, what better gift can we hope for than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God than to be absolved of the world?”
4. The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights - bad, boring, arcane
Discussion of the various pros and cons of different translations of this famous Arab book. Presented in floral, somewhat abstruse, language when a tighter and less delphic style would be more agreeable on such an idiosyncratic subject.
Also, are we really to believe JLB read several editions of this voluminous book, including footnotes, in English and three MORE in German!?!
5. The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton - mediocre
Essay on the detective story and its various rules and examples thereof
6. Two Films (Crime and Punishment and The Thirty-Nine Steps) - mediocre
Essay about how von Sternberg’s film version of Crime and Punishment doesn’t do it justice and how Hitchcock’s version of The Thirty-Nine Steps turns ‘an absolutely dull adventure story’ into a good film.
7. Joyce’s Latest Novel - good, but hard to judge having not read Finnegans Wake!
Critiques Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for being too oblique and for some of his word creation while also recognising his talent as a writer in other works.
8. A Pedagogy of Hatred - good
Criticism of an anti-Semitic German textbook used in schools written in 1937. Prescient.
9. A Comment on August 23, 1944. Good, interesting ideas about the nature of Nazism.
Reflections on this day in WW2 from his perspective, as an Allied supporter, and his reactions to Nazi supporting friends in Argentina.
“They are fickle, and by behaving incoherently they are no longer aware that incoherence need be justified. They adore the German race, but they abhor ‘Saxon’ America; they condemn the articles of Versailles, but they applaud the wonders of the Blitzkrieg; they are anti-Semitic, but they profess a religion of Hebrew origin; they celebrate submarine warfare, but they vigorously condemn British acts of piracy; they denounce imperialism, but they defend and proclaim the theory of Lebensraum [‘living space’, German expansionism]; they idolise San Martin, but they regard the independence of America as a mistake; they apply the canon of Jesus to the actions of England, but the canon of Zarathustra to those of Germany.”
“For Europeans and Americans, one order and only one is possible; it used to be called Rome, and now it is called Western Culture. To be a Nazi (to play the energetic barbarian, Viking, Tartar, 16th century conquistador, gaucho, or Indian) is, after all, mentally and morally impossible. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have know that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.”
10. On William Beckford’s Vathek - good, interesting reflections on the nature of Hell as JLB perceives it in this book
“So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasising different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realised that the protagonist was the same.”
JLB reflects on Hell as a place of unknown and unknowable psychological confusion, not simply a place where the horrors we know on earth are magnified (cf. Dante). He describes it as ‘uncanny’ and sees it as having an inscrutable and unfathomable quality. This is the same description that we find in the postscript to Essay 2 (The Duration of Hell*). As with some descriptions of Heaven in the Bible, it is totally and utterly other wordly and defies conception by earthly beings such as ourselves. JLB seems to suggest it can only be glimpsed in the senseless unreality and panic of nightmares.
*”I dreamed I was awakening from another dream - an uproar of chaos and cataclysms - into an unrecognisable room. Day was dawning: light suffused the room, outlining the foot of the wrought-iron bed, the upright chair, the closed door and windows, the bare table. I thought fearfully, ‘Where am I?’ and I realised I didn’t know. I thought ‘Who am I?’ and I couldn’t recognise myself. My fear grew. I thought: This desolate awakening is in Hell, this eternal vigil will be my destiny. Then I really woke up trembling.”
11. An Overwhelming Film - mixed but largely good, interesting ideas with some grandiose statements
There is a huge amount expressed incredibly concisely in this review of Citizen Kane, which is no more than 500 words long. JLB describes two plots; one, ‘pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits’. The other, ‘ a kind of metaphysical detective story, its subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought’. This idea that every man’s life is fragmentary and incongruous is a powerful one and is repeated elsewhere in this collection of essays (cf. #10). JLB sees the second plot as a collection of fragments from Kane’s life, who is representative of everyone, and invites the viewer to interpret them, or reconstruct them coherently, himself; an impossible task.
“No man knows who he is, no man is anyone” seems essentially correct to me and reminds me of Tolstoy’s determinism in W&P.
However, statements like “Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth” seem overblown and grandiloquent.
The assessment that it is a work of genius that will endure but not be rewatched very much seems prescient to me, but this is a wholly personal perspective and one I may revise if I watch it again!
12. Our Poor Individualism - good, by necessity a generalisation, but draws interesting ideas out from it
Essay on how the Argentine character is essentially different from the European or North American one in terms of interaction, or identification, with the state. While cultural ‘Westerners’, according to JLB, see themselves as existing within a meaningful and logical cosmos; Argentinians see only chaos. This may derive from the efficacy of the respective governments but the effect is that while Westerners ‘believe’ in the order and abstract justice of the state; Argentinians do not. At present, JLB concedes that this has largely negative consequences (e.g. corruption and theft from public coffers), but he conjectures that in an era where the most urgent problem is ‘the gradual interference of the State in the acts of the individual’ that this primacy of individual may yet prove valuable. He also notes the affinity between Argentine and Spanish culture; seemingly presuming a common heritage in pre-colonial Spain for some of these characteristics.
“The State is impersonal; the Argentine can only conceive of personal relations. Therefore, to him, robbing public funds is not a crime.”
“He feels with Don Quixote that, ‘everybody hath sins of his own to answer for’ and that ‘it is not seemly, that honest men should be the executioners of their fellow creatures, on account of matters with which they have no concern’” (Both quotes Quixote I, XXII)
13. On Oscar Wilde - mediocre, perhaps because of the limited amount of Wilde I have read
JLB argues that Wilde is often misconceived as a complex and experimental author because of his own success. People attribute phrases to him unjustly and overlook the readable, simple character of his prose. Also praises him highly as a bastion of innocence, enjoyment and fun.
14. The Wall and Books - mediocre to bad
JLB reflects on two of the most famous actions of Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti: the construction of the Great Wall and the destruction of all books in his kingdom that predated his rule. The second of these acts is disputed. JLB, ever keen to interrogate the nature of time and history, proposes a few deeper, metaphysical motivations for what appear prima facie to be political actions aimed at the preservation of power. None are especially convincing but some are quite interesting.
15. The Innocence of Layamon - bad
Arcane discussion of an arcane book
16. Coleridge’s Dream - mediocre, interesting history but unlikely conclusion
Explanation of how Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’ came to him in a dream and brief examination of other works of art that have oneiric inspiration. JLB notes that Kubla Khan’s own inspiration to build his palace came to him as a dream in the 13th century, some 500 years before Coleridge’s poem. Despite claiming to be someone who always tries to disbelieve the supernatural, JLB goes on to argue that these two events are cosmically linked; “an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object...is gradually entering the world”. I’d be more inclined to believe that Coleridge somehow had knowledge of Kubla Khan’s dream-inspired palace. A thesis JLB posits, then rejects in favour of his supernatural, eternal archetype! This magical explanation could have been better supported by an examination of the similarities between the poem and the palace. However, given the magical topography of the poem I doubt this would have strengthened JLB’s position and this may be why he excludes it. An interesting brief history with a fanciful, albeit attractive, conclusion.
17. The Enigma Of Shakespeare - good, informative and interesting
The enigma of Shakespeare is that a man with a grammar school education and only a little knowledge of Latin and Greek could write such universally admired, complex plays. Another facet of the enigma is that he sold his theatre and stopped writing a few years before his death. JLB examines the theory that the author of the plays was in fact Francis Bacon, who demurred to be named as their author because the lowly status of playwrights conflicted with his political ambitions. He rejects this on stylistic and linguistic grounds. He gives more credence to the theory that Christopher Marlowe may have written the plays, identifying his style as far more commensurate with the genius of Shakespeare. Historically, he may have faked his death at 29 and moved to Scotland, sending the plays to Shakespeare to publish for him. Ultimately, JLB rejects both of these theories and concludes that Shakespeare himself was the author of his works despite his relative lack of education. As for the mystery of his abandoning writing, JLB claims he wrote primarily to be performed and that his desire to write may have waned, and eventually died, alongside the actors for whom he was writing.
Opposing Shakespeare’s style to Bacon’s in refutation of theory that Bacon wrote many of Shakespeare’s plays, “Shakespeare, on the contrary, had, as we know, a profound feeling for the English language, which is perhaps unique among Western languages in its possession of what might be called a double register. For common words, for the ideas, say of a child, a rustic, a sailor, or a peasant, it has words of Saxon origin, and for intellectual matters it has words derived from Latin. These words are never precisely synonymous, there is always a nuance of differentiation: it is one thing to say, Saxonly, ‘dark’ and another to say ‘obscure’; one thing to say ‘brotherhood’ and another to say ‘fraternity’; one thing - especially for poetry, which depends not only on atmosphere and on meaning but on the connotations of the atmosphere of words to say, Latinly, ‘unique’ and another to say ‘single.’”
“Coleridge used Spinoza’s vocabulary in praise of Shakespeare. He said that Shakespeare was what Spinoza calls ‘natura naturans,’ creative nature: the force that takes all forms, that lies as if dead in rocks, that sleeps in plants, that dreams in the lives of animals, which are conscious only of the present moment, and that reaches its consciousness, or a certain consciousness in us, in mankind, the ‘natura naturans.’
18. Blindness - good, interesting perspectives and admirable bravery and philosophy in the face of adversity
Borges writes about the experience of being blind and the cruel irony of losing the ability to read and write at the same time as being appointed the Director of The National Library of Argentina. He also answers a question I have been pondering, sporadically and idly, for around 25 years! I remember attending a talk at primary school aged 6 or 7. The talk was to be given by a blind person and we were asked to think of some questions to ask at the end. I remember fervently conferring with my classmates about what a blind person actually ‘saw’; was it blackness? Was it nothingness? If it was nothingness, couldn’t they see through it? My juvenile mind became excited about the answer. However, when the time came to ask and I put my question to the blind person, the response was simply, ‘nothing’. I felt disappointed and frustrated and asked if it was nothing as in blackness. The blind person explained he couldn’t see colours and moved on to the next question dismissively. Perhaps he had been blind since birth and couldn’t understand the question I was attempting to ask; perhaps he didn’t think about it in the same terms as I was asking. Nonetheless, I felt like I knew nothing more about what a blind person experienced visually and was sad; perhaps in part because I thought it was a good question and it had seemingly proved to be the very opposite! To my delight, when reading this essay, I discovered:
“One of the colours that the blind - or at least this blind man - do not see is black; another is red...I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind.”
Why does JLB only invite his female students to study Anglo Saxon with him? Womanizer?
Interesting to note that he is blind given the book also contains film reviews although perhaps they predate his blindness.
“Now I know that shyness is one of the evils one must try to overcome, that in reality to be shy doesn’t matter - it is like so many other things to which one gives exaggerated importance.”
“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so” - JLB credits his blindness with opening new avenues of learning (Swedish, Anglo Saxon, etc.)
Wednesday, 14 March 2018
Ben Macintyre - The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty
This is an interesting and well researched book. Adam Worth is a fascinating character and Macintye paints a vivid portrait using extensive source material. Worth is a thrill seeking crook par excellence and pulls himself up to pretty dizzying heights using only his wits. I suppose it is a form of the American dream only realised via illicit means. He goes from a penniless street urchin to a feted member of Victorian London society with a mansion, an apartment on Piccadily, a yacht, a shooting lodge and a house on the front at Brighton entertaining in style and living a life of lavish luxury. Perhaps it is the material trappings that make criminal activities that would otherwise be frowned upon more acceptable when their practitioner is wildly successful. I think there is an element of this but other endearing features of Worth’s character, as portrayed in this book, included his generosity and loyalty to his friends and coconspiritors, his meticulous planning and quick wits, his considerable abilities in avoiding detection and his tee-totalling and abhorrence of violence.
However, Worth can hardly be described as a moderate character and, given the heights he attained in his action packed life, no sensible person should expect him to be so. He seems to have been a serious social climber, an affected and blase spendthrift and, perhaps most all, an inveterate thrill seeker. Some of these things clearly go hand in hand; a man with more modest spending habits could have retired several times over on the takings from his criminal career. Nonetheless, he also seems to have stolen, schemed and involved himself in the world of crime out of a sheer love of the game rather than simply to sustain his exorbitant spending habits. Eventually, this love of thrills lands him in jail in Belgium; an incident that essentially ruined his life. In his old age he lives to regret his profligacy and turns to alcohol in the manner he had eschewed for most of his career. All told, it is a deeply sad story and goes to show how even the most artful criminal mastermind can never really escape the perils of his profession; both material and psychological.
The theft of The Duchess of Devonshire, a Gainsborough picture sold for the highest price ever recorded before its theft, makes for a good centerpiece around which the author can build this highly eclectic and swashbuckling life. Of course, he may have romanticised and dramatised it in places but I was impressed and in agreement with his representation of the picture as a metaphor for Worth’s own life. Worth clearly wanted to live in style and be acceptable in the eyes of Victorian society. But he was also a thief and rapscallion of the first order. As such, while he possessed the envy of the entire art world, the object of desire for much of British high society, he could never display it or even confess to owning it! The fact that he kept it shows some romantic or symbolic attachment to it as it was clearly a risk to be carrying such an item while also committing other crimes.
You can’t help but like Worth’s dedication to his criminal partners. Breaking them out of prison, lending them money and paying expensive lawyers fees and bribes. In the end, this was never repaid and his partners, and even family, cheated, extorted and abandoned him to the last. His lavish lifestyle, daring and cheek in dealing with the authorities are all highly entertaining as well. But the story has a sad ending and I could only end up feeling pity for this bright, capable risk seeker who, in this depiction, does indeed seem to be a cut above the other characters in the rogues gallery he consorted with.
The book contains several other fascinating characters; most of all William Pinkerton, who ran a detective agency far superior to all the police services in the world. His story strikes me as at least as interesting as Worth’s. For reasons largely unexplained, he takes a liking to Worth and assists him considerably by not providing the Belgian authorities with the evidence he has accumulated about him when he is locked up and on trail. The two, extraordinarily, go on to become firm friends! Pinkerton helps Worth to negotiate the return of the famous portrait he has stolen decades ago when he down and out following his release from jail. They write to each other and Pinkerton goes on to assist his children and employ his son in the detective agency. To me, this gave some evidence that he was a form of ‘honest crook’, if such a thing can exist, although a sceptic might argue it is more likely evidence that him and Pinkerton were involved in mutually beneficial shady dealings in the past!
The book is pretty well written, sometimes a little arrogant in its tone, sometimes a little journalistic, sometimes a little obviously seeking to overplay tenuous connections. I can’t argue with the author’s command of the sources, which is impressive and interesting in equal measure. In fairness, making the links to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character Moriarty is an obvious way of increasing sales and does seem to have some merit. Not least because of Pinkerton’s publication of life of Adam Worth and subsequent anger that Conan Doyle had stolen so much of his material. For me though, the main attraction was Worth’s life and not the connections it may have had to more famous men like Conan Doyle and JP Morgan. Overall, an engaging middleweight read!
However, Worth can hardly be described as a moderate character and, given the heights he attained in his action packed life, no sensible person should expect him to be so. He seems to have been a serious social climber, an affected and blase spendthrift and, perhaps most all, an inveterate thrill seeker. Some of these things clearly go hand in hand; a man with more modest spending habits could have retired several times over on the takings from his criminal career. Nonetheless, he also seems to have stolen, schemed and involved himself in the world of crime out of a sheer love of the game rather than simply to sustain his exorbitant spending habits. Eventually, this love of thrills lands him in jail in Belgium; an incident that essentially ruined his life. In his old age he lives to regret his profligacy and turns to alcohol in the manner he had eschewed for most of his career. All told, it is a deeply sad story and goes to show how even the most artful criminal mastermind can never really escape the perils of his profession; both material and psychological.
The theft of The Duchess of Devonshire, a Gainsborough picture sold for the highest price ever recorded before its theft, makes for a good centerpiece around which the author can build this highly eclectic and swashbuckling life. Of course, he may have romanticised and dramatised it in places but I was impressed and in agreement with his representation of the picture as a metaphor for Worth’s own life. Worth clearly wanted to live in style and be acceptable in the eyes of Victorian society. But he was also a thief and rapscallion of the first order. As such, while he possessed the envy of the entire art world, the object of desire for much of British high society, he could never display it or even confess to owning it! The fact that he kept it shows some romantic or symbolic attachment to it as it was clearly a risk to be carrying such an item while also committing other crimes.
You can’t help but like Worth’s dedication to his criminal partners. Breaking them out of prison, lending them money and paying expensive lawyers fees and bribes. In the end, this was never repaid and his partners, and even family, cheated, extorted and abandoned him to the last. His lavish lifestyle, daring and cheek in dealing with the authorities are all highly entertaining as well. But the story has a sad ending and I could only end up feeling pity for this bright, capable risk seeker who, in this depiction, does indeed seem to be a cut above the other characters in the rogues gallery he consorted with.
The book contains several other fascinating characters; most of all William Pinkerton, who ran a detective agency far superior to all the police services in the world. His story strikes me as at least as interesting as Worth’s. For reasons largely unexplained, he takes a liking to Worth and assists him considerably by not providing the Belgian authorities with the evidence he has accumulated about him when he is locked up and on trail. The two, extraordinarily, go on to become firm friends! Pinkerton helps Worth to negotiate the return of the famous portrait he has stolen decades ago when he down and out following his release from jail. They write to each other and Pinkerton goes on to assist his children and employ his son in the detective agency. To me, this gave some evidence that he was a form of ‘honest crook’, if such a thing can exist, although a sceptic might argue it is more likely evidence that him and Pinkerton were involved in mutually beneficial shady dealings in the past!
The book is pretty well written, sometimes a little arrogant in its tone, sometimes a little journalistic, sometimes a little obviously seeking to overplay tenuous connections. I can’t argue with the author’s command of the sources, which is impressive and interesting in equal measure. In fairness, making the links to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character Moriarty is an obvious way of increasing sales and does seem to have some merit. Not least because of Pinkerton’s publication of life of Adam Worth and subsequent anger that Conan Doyle had stolen so much of his material. For me though, the main attraction was Worth’s life and not the connections it may have had to more famous men like Conan Doyle and JP Morgan. Overall, an engaging middleweight read!
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