Schopenhauer

(1) William Desmond, “Art, Origins, Otherness – Between philosophy and art”, State University of new York Press 2003; “… In Schopenhauer’s will willing itself, we find an unstable mixture of lack and power. Lack: for all striving and desire arises from deficiency, he says. Power: her in the imperious form of insistence on itself. Wt is the mix of the lack and this self-insisting power? You might say that the self-insisting is necessary to overcome t hack that it also deeply intimate to it. But if the lack is so intimate, how can it will itself affirmatively, that s, he self-affirming power? For self-affirming will also be affirming lack, itself as lack. The contradiction seems to be inherent in it as such. And while you might then go on to say: this inherent contradiction is just why it must affirm itself. Else it were noting: the fact remains, that its affirmation itself thus must also be infected by that same noting its affirmation seems on the surface, to overcome. Will willing itself then is also will willing nothing – or indeed, is will willing itself as a nothing. But does this do justice to the positive power of the self-affirming will, without which this whole process would not be at all, much less be in any form of which we could even speak and make some sense? / This claim of inherent contradiction in the origin is something we find in Schelling, and in Hegel also [the negative, and hence evil is imminent in the absolute, for here is nothing transcendent]. It is also to the fore in the younger Nietzsche – he will acknowledge this in Zarathustra, though claiming that he somehow transcended it [I will contest this in the next chapter].

(2) (passim: We have here a variation on the double parentage of eros in penia and porros, as mythically spoken by Diotima. Notice with Schopenhauer: while the peria, or lacking is foregrounded well enough, the poros has been contracted to the more cunning ruse of self-seeking interest. It is poros for which what is other incapable of that release of generosity that gives itself over to an other, and ‘outside’ itself. This will is playing with the others but really only playing with itself. That is, the divine festivity, the intoxication of poros at the feast of the gods is not remembered, and hence also the sleeping agapeic powers of eros itself: its beginning beyond itself in a release that is not simply for itself alone. / This oblivion of the promise of agapeic release changes the whole countenance of eros. Its promise of the heavenly eros, the eros Uranus, is kept asleep, perhaps smothered or murdered, so that it will never awake from the divine intoxication. But keep that promise asleep, and the energies of eros awake will give birth to a new monster – an eros turannos untrammelled in its self-insistence. Universal creation must become universal destruction. And even if creation seems the first act, it is counterfeit creation for the point of the whole is just that there is no point. Since it is all pointless, creation is only the beguiling side of the mask over universal destruction. The ‘yes’ to life, the ‘yes’ of life to itself, only covers over the grinning, triumphant skull of death, the face of facelessness, the ‘face’ of the absolute ‘no’. There is, and can't be, no Sabbath. / And so honesty dictates that, if the above is true there is no ‘It is good’. [I forbear to pursue the question: how could honesty dictate anything, if there is no ‘it is good’. For honesty is fidelity to the ‘It is good’ of being true; and ultimately ether is no good in being true.]

(3) Passim: But you reply: There is to be [in the sense: there ‘ought to be’] an ‘it is good’, and we must utter it in the face of the comfortless fact about being that ‘it is not good’. But then, I reply, what this ‘it is to be good’ really means now is: ‘It is no good’. But then, I reply what this ‘it is to be good’ really mean now is ‘It is no good’. No wonder that we flip from the ‘to be’ as good into a cry of: ‘Better not to be at all.’ But did Nietzsche have to shout his ‘no’ to his ‘no’, not only because he felt too deeply its seduction? And how could such a lashed ‘yes’ be the released ‘yes’? / Here and then Hegel refers to the notion of God as ‘over disporing with itself’, and while agreeing with this, he claims it becomes ‘insipid’ is we omit the negative. Perhaps we avoid the ‘insipid’ [a favourite term of disfavour for Hegel], but can we avoid horror? Horror, if the horror of the negative is inherent in this ‘love disporing with itself? We escape eh slight to tour philosophical self-esteem by sentimental insipidity but in the process we blithely run the risk of sanctifying evil. Think of how Schopenhauerian eros is also ‘love disporting with itself’, but it seems to be so gluttonously contracted on its own self-seeking and satisfaction, it is finally alone with itself and nothing but itself. Of course, Hegel’s God disports with itself by playing with the whole world, nature and history; and it too seeks to be at one with itself, reconciled with itself. I wonder if there is more honesty in Schopenhauer about this ‘God’ that disports with itself. Honesty I seeing that it not flips in its opposite and shows a face more like the evil genius disporting with itself?  / And with us??

(4) Passim: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the’ gods, they kill us for their sport.’ Thus the blinded, comfortless Gloucester in King Lear [IV, 1, 36-37]. But Gloucester sees in his blindness, Schopenhauer’s evil genius is a wanton god whose disporing with himself is staged in nature’s horrors, and history’s. Hegel speaks of nature and history as God’s two temples. Nature and history might ‘objectify’ Schopenhauer’s will, but these ‘objectifications’ are not temples but slaughterhouses and torture chambers. Hegel’s absolute is an erotic origin also, but it is as if now the dark evil immanent in that absolute reveals more fully the noting, the destruction in all its creation. The logic of the eros turannos that has evil immanent in it is simply more forthrightly showed in our faces by Schopenhauer. / Must we then conclude the following about Schopenhauer’s willing itself: as erotic I cannot be realised to the ‘is it good’? But what of the art of this will? What of creation? Then here is no releasing of its ‘creation’. This is all the sport of the wanton god. Think of it in human terms. The will, our willing, is blithely intent on building crystal palaces, only then to find itself miserable in them and then again it proceeds to destroy them again once more to repeat its own futile building. And so this will come to itself in its creation as finally nothing. The active lack that drives it to being, that drives its ‘to be’, is everything and nothing. There is no plenitude of glorious being in itself; no glory of existence communicated to the other in the release of the creation.

(4) Passim: The drive from will to something is only a quasi-move to something. For overall it is a drive from lack to nothing, with ‘what is’ in-between as the vanishing medium of its own insatiable self-deluding willing of itself. Schopenhauer’s will as an erotic origin is the dark mirror image of the self-satisfied, self-certain, self-mediating reason of Hegel’s absolute. It wilful ‘mediation’ is only a mere provisional satisfaction deluded about itself. Hegel absolutizes this self-delusion, and class it the absolute. This absolutization of reason is absolutely irrational. This absolute knowing is absolute self-delusion, for when ‘full’ self-knowledge hits us we are hit with absolute ‘emptiness’ and we must seat hard to stifle the cry of horror. / Again one is brought to ask: is this to be more honest than Hegel? See the death that is the counterfeit life of the absolute. See the life that counterfeits the death that is absolute. No wonder reversing Leibnitz, this world seem the ‘worst possible’ for Schopenhauer. No wonder the evil genius sees to hold sway rather the good God. No wonder, reversing Leibnitz, this world seems the ‘worst possible’ for Schopenhauer. No wonder the evils genius seems to hold sway rather than the good god. And art? But it too seems impotent to release us to an ‘is it good’. Can it be holy?

(5) Passim: The honest answer must be no. Te only release is an escape from the means ‘it is’ as evil. How far we are erred from Parmenides’  ‘esti!’! Any ‘It is’ means ‘It is not’. . Any ‘It is good’ counterfeits ‘it is evil’. There is no Sabbath only it’s counterfeit. If this is the ultimate ‘truth’, [I say truth’ since thus too may counterfeit ‘untruth – with a bow to Nietzsche the release of art and the hole cannot bring us to life or towards life as worth. They can only turn us away from it as unworthy. Beauty gilds the more basic ugliness, as the holy hides us from, hides from us, the ‘unholiest of unholies’.” (Basically, Schopenhauer attached too much attention to superficialities; he did not see the heart of real social and political life. He was a child of the German classical philosophy, but represented a dead end in it.)

Late oermaatschappij, Java

(1) W. H. Kassers, “Panji, the culture hero – A structural study of religion in Java”, Martinus Nijhof 1982; “The distinction made between the social functions or – in other words – the division of the entire material wealth into ‘male’ and ‘female’ goods, with the weapon and the cloth as the typical object for these groups, cannot in my opinion be based on a simple division of the tribe into two phratries; it must be related in the more general and more fundament contrast of the two aspects – matrilineal and patrilineal – of the total community as such. This is not difficult to understand. If we fully realize wherein lies the function of cloth and weapon, then we clearly perceive that these objects serve to depict neither the relation between man and women in their capacity as being that happen to belong to different sexes, nor, consequently, [also according to van Wouden] the relation between the phratries of the matrilineal grouping. It is at the contracting of marriage that we see the distinction between ‘male’ and ‘female’ goods showing itself; clot and weapon regularly comprise a part, indeed the most essential, the universally charirerizing part of the object of value that the clans, in so far as they come into contact with each other for purposes of marriage, cede to one another. Weapon and cloth therefore characterize the relation between man and women, or rather between the clan concerned, as parties to the marriage contract. Now in the double-unilateral system, a man is not only restricted when closing his wife, to the matrilineal phratry to which he himself does not belong; his wife must also be a member of the patrilineal phratry to which he himself does not belong. Bridegroom and bride are in a double sense each other’s opposite in the social grouping.

(2) Passim: This means that the special character of their union – the element therefore that is symbolised in the ritual by the giving of a weapon on the one hand and a garment on the other – lies in the fact that the two general aspects of the community come into contact with each other. A certain patrilineal totem allies itself with a certain matrilineal totem. For though both husband and wife bring into the marriage their paternal as well as their maternal totem, the significance of these tomes of the contract into which they enter and for the offspring that can be expected, is not the same for both sides. In a community with double grouping, every individual, in a certain respect, finis familia suae; the man hands down only his paternal totem to his children, his maternal totem is lost on his death; the eternal in him, his soul, lies exclusively in the patrilineal aspect of his personality, of which the weapon [to be more precise, in actual fact a particular type of it] is the most striking symbol; it is only though this that the share in the eternal life of his community. The same holds good for the woman, but the other way round; no doubt her place in the community and consequently her marriage prospects, are likewise also determined by her paternal totem, but this does not alter the fact that the latter is as transient as her body: the woman has a lasting existence only as the giver of the cloth, that is as the bearer of the matrilineal life principle.”

Sociologie, Subcultuur

(1) Div., “The Student Revolt – The activists Speak”, Panther 1968 – Jacques Sauvageot, “Interview door Hervé Bourges”; “H.B: How can you create a new, socialist university in a capitalist society? Isn’t that contradictory? // J.S.: Of course it is. It brings the aims and content of education into question. And even where the democratization of education is concerned we should have no illusion. If few workers’ or peasants’ children can get into university it is not just because of the barriers to higher education, it is because from childhood hey have become accustomed to a kind of thought that prevents them finding a place on the educational system and making their career there on the same basis as the others. So the problem arises even in het infant school. Once the sixth form is reached, most of the children of workers and peasants have been eliminated. So we must struggle with society and thereby redefine the goals of education. / To return to your question, a socialist university cannot grow up in a capitalist society. A university has a number of functions which are themselves linked to a particular system. So, in a capitalist society, it is impossible to have a university that functions for the workers. In these circumstances, our job is to turn as much light as possible on to the contradictions with the university system and in society; thus it will be possible to develop a dialectical moment that allows the growth of consciousness among students and among the population as a whole. / So we must set up a number of challenging powers, parallel structure, and confront the problems of the capitalist university, with the aim of destroying that university. The situation can be made to evolve, given this dialectical, and therefore dynamic, movement.”

Horror, Spookhuizen

(1) Div., ”Poe – A collection of critical essays”, Prentice Hall 1967 -  Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe”; “The House of Usher, like many edifices in Poe is in a state of extreme decay. The stonework of its façade has so crumbled and decompose that it remind the narrator, as he put it, ‘of the specious totality of old wood-work which as rotted for long years in some neglected vault. ‘The Usher mansion is so eaten away, so fragile, that it seems a breeze would push it over; it remains standing only because the atmosphere of Usher’s domain is perfectly motionless and dead. Such is the case also with the ‘time-eaten’ towers that tremble not’ in Poe’s poem ‘The city in the Sea’; and likewise the magnificent architecture of ‘The domain of Arnheim’ is said to ‘sustain itself by a miracle in mid-air.’ Even the detective Dupin lives in a perilously decayed structure: the narrator of ’The Murder in the Rue Morgue’ tells how he and Dupin dwelt in a ‘time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not enquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain.’[Notice how, even when Poe’s buildings are situated in cities, he manages to circumscribe them with protective desolation.] / We must now ask what Poe means by the extreme and tottering decay of many of his structure. The answer is best given by reference to ‘The fall of the House of Usher’, and in giving the answer we shall arrive, I think, at an understanding of the pattern of that story.  /

(2) Passim: ‘The fall of the House of Usher’ is a journey into the depths of the self. I have said that all journeys in Poe are allegories of the process of dreaming, and we must understand ‘The Fall of the House of /Usher’ as  a dream of the narrator’s in which he leaves behind him the waking, physical world and journeys inward toward his moi intérieur, toward his inner and spiritual self. That inner and spiritual self is Roderick Usher. / Roderick Usher, then, is a part of the narrator’s self, which the narrator reaches by way of reverie. We may think of Usher, if we like, as the narrator’s imagination, or as his visionary soul. Or we may think of him as state of mind which the narrator enters at a certain stage of his progress into dreams. Considered as a state of mind. Roderick Usher is an allegorical figure representing the hypnagogic state. / The hypnagogic state, about which there is strangely little said in the literature of psychology, is a condition of semi-consciousness in which the closed eye beholds  continuous procession of vivid and constantly changing forms. These forms sometimes have colour, and are often abstract in character. Poe regarded the hypnagogic state as the visionary condition par excellence, and he considered its rapidly shifting abstract images to be – as he put it – ‘glimpses of the spirit’s outer world’. The visionary glimpse, Poe says in one of his Marginalia, ‘arise in the soul … only …. At those mere points of time where the confines of ht waking world blend with those of the world of dreams.’ And Poe goes on to say: ‘I am aware of these ‘fancies’ only when I am upon the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so.’/

(3) Passim: Roderick Usher enact he hypnagogic state in a number of ways. For one thing, the narrator describes Roderick’s behaviour as inconsistent, and characterized by constant alternation: he is alternately vivacious and sullen; he is alternatively communicative and rapt; he speaks at one moment with ‘tremulous indecision’ and at the next with ‘energetic concision’ of an excited opium-eater. His conduct resembles, in other words, that wavering between consciousness and subconsciousnes which characterises the hypnagogic state. The trembling of Roderick’s body, and the floating of is silken hair, also bring to mind ht instability and underwater quality of hypnagogic images. His improvisation on the guitar suggests hypnagogic experience in their rapidity, changeableness, and wild novelty. And as for Usher’s paintings, which the narrator describes as ‘pure abstractions’, they quite simply are hypnagogic images. The narrator says of Roderick., ‘from the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness’s as with I shuddered the more thrillingly because I shudder without knowing why – for these paintings [vivid as their images now are before me] I would in vain endeavour to reduce more than a small portion which should lie with the compass of merely written words’  That the narrator finds Roderick’s paintings indiscernible is interesting, because in that one of the Marginalia from which I have quoted, Poe asserts that only things in human experience which lie ‘beyond the compass of words’ are the visions of the hypnagogic state. / Roderick Usher stand for the hypnagogic state, which as Poe said is teetering condition of mind occurring ‘upon the very brink of sleep. ‘Since Roderick is the embodiments of a state of mind in which falling – falling asleep – is imminent, it is appropriate that the building which symbolizes his mind should promise at every moment to fall.

(4) Passim: The House of Usher stares down broodingly at its reflection in the tarn below, as in the hypnagogic state the conscious mind may stare into the subconscious; the house threatens continually to collapse because it is extremely easy from the mind to step from the hypnagogic state into the depts of sleep; and when the House of Usher does fall, the story ends, as it must, because the mind, at the end of its inward journey, has plunged into the darkness of sleep. / We have found one allegorical meaning in the tottering decay of Poe’s buildings; there is another meaning, equally important which may be stated very briefly. I have said that Poe saw the poet as at war with the material world and with the material or psychical aspects of himself; and I have said that Poe identified poetic imagination with the power to escape from the material and the materialistic, to exclude them from consciousness and so subjectively destroy them. Now, if we recall these things, and recall also that the exteriors of Poe’s houses or palaces, with their eye-like windows and mouth-like doors, represent the psychical features of Poe’s dreaming heroes, then the characteristic dilapidation of Poe’s architecture takes on sudden significance. The extreme decay of the house of usher – a decay so extreme as to approach the atmospheric – is quite simply a sign that the narrator, in reaching that state of mid which he calls Roderick Usher, has very nearly dreamt himself free of his physical body,  and the material world to which that body connects him.

(5) Passim: This is what decay or decomposion mean everywhere in Poe; and we find them almost everywhere. Poe’s preoccupation with decay is not, as some critics have thought, an indication of necrophilia; decay in Poe is a symbol of visionary remoteness from the physical, a sign that the state of mind represented is one of almost pure spirituality. When the House of Usher disintegrates or dematerialises at the close of the story, it does so because Roderick Usher has become all soul. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, then, is not really a horror story; it is a triumphant report by the narrator that it is possible for the poetic soul to shake off this temporal, rational, physical world and escape, if only for a moment, to a realm of unfettered vision. / We have now arrived at three notions about Poe’s typical building. It is set apart in a valley or a sea or a waste place, and this remoteness is intended to express the retreat of the poet’s mind from worldly consciousness into ram. It is a tottery structure, and this indicates that the dreamer within is in that unstable threshold condition called the hypnagogic state. Finally, Poe’s typical building is crumbling or decomposing, and this means that the dreamer’s mind is moving toward a perfect freedom from his material self and the material word. Let us now open the door – or mouth – of Poe’s building and visit the mind inside. /

(6) Passim: As we enter the palace of the visionary hero of ‘The Assignation’, or the house of Roderick Usher we find ourselves approaching the master’s private chamber by way of dim and winding passage, or a winding staircase. There is no end to dim windings in Poe’s fiction; there are dim and wining word paths, dim and winding streets, dim and wining watercourse – and, whenever the symbolism is architectural there are lively to be dim and winding passages or staircases. It is not at all hard to guess what Poe means by this symbol. If we think of waking life as dominated by reason, and if we think of the reason as a daylight faculty which operates in straight lines, then it is proper that reverie should be represented as an obscure and wandering movement of the mind. There are other and equally obvious meanings in Poe’s symbol of dim and winding passages: to grope through such passages is to become confused as to place and direction, just as in reverie we begin to lose any sense of locality, and to have an infinite freedom in regard to space. In his description of the huge old mansion in which William Wilson went to school, Poe makes this meaning of winding passage very plain: ‘but the house! - - how quaint an old building was this! – to me how veritable a place of enchantment! There was no end to its windings – to its incomprehensible subdivision. It was difficult, at any given time to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be. From each room to every theory there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable – inconceivable and so retuning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered on infinity.’//

(7) Passim: Dim windings indicate the state of reverie; they point toward that infinite freedom in and from space which the mind achieves in dreams; also, in their curvature and in their occasional doubling back, they anticipate the minds’ final spiralling plunge into unconsciousness. But the immediate goal of reverie’s winding passages is that magnificent chamber in which we find the visionary hero slumped in a chair or lolling on an ottoman, occupied in purging his consciousness of everything that is earthly. / Since I have been speaking of geometry – of straight lines and curves and spirals – perhaps the first ting to notice about Po’s dram rooms is their shape. It has already been said that the enclosures of Poe’s tales incline to a curving or circular form. And Poe himself, in certain of his essays and dialogues explains this inclination by denouncing what he calls ‘the harsh mathematical reason of the schools’ and complaining that practical science has covered the face of the earth with rectangular obscenities.’ Poe quite explicitly identifies regular angular forms with everyday reason, and the circle, ova, or fluid arabesque with the otherworldly imagination Therefore, if we discover that the dream chambers of Poe’s fiction are free of angular regularity, we may be sure that are noticing a pointed and purposeful consistency in his architecture and décor. /

(8) Passim: The ball-room of the story ‘Hop-Frog’ is circular. The Devils apartment in ‘The Duc de l’Omelette’ has its corners ‘rounded into niches’, and we find rounded corners also in Poe’s essay ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’. In ‘Ligeia’, the bridal chamber is a pentagonal turret room; however the angels are concealed by sarcophagi, so that the effect is circular. The corners of Roderick Ushers chamber are likewise concealed, being lost in deep shadow. Other dream rooms are either irregular or indeterminate in form. For example, there are the seven rooms of Prince Prosperoro’s imperial suite in ‘the Masque of the Red death’. As Poe observes, ‘In many palaces … such sites form a long and straight vista’; but in Prince Prospero’s palace, as he describes it’ the apartment were so irregularly dispose that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yard, and each turn a novel effect.’ The turret room of the The Oval Portrait is not defined as to shape; we are told, however, that it is architecturally ‘bizarre’, and complicated by a quantity of unexpected nooks and niches. Similarly, the visionary’s apartment in ‘the Assignation’ is described only as dazzling, astounding and original in its architecture; we are not told in what way its dimensions are peculiar but is teems safe to assume that it could be a difficult room to measure for wall-to-wall carpeting. The room of ‘the Assignation’, by the way – like that of ‘Ligeia’ – has its walls enshrouded in rich figured draperies which are continually agitated by some mysterious agency. The fluid shifting of the figures suggests, of course, the behaviour of hypnagogic images; but the agitation of the draperies would also produce a perpetual ambiguity of architectural form and the effect would resemble that which Pevsner ascribes to the interior San Vialte in Ravenna: ‘a sensation of uncertain [and] of a dreamlike floating.’ /

(9) Passim: Poe, as you see, is at great pains to avoid depicting the usual squares sort of room in which we spend much of our waking lives. His chambers of dream either approximate the circle – an infinite form which is, as Poe somewhere observes, ‘the emblem of Eternity’ – or they so lack any apprehensible regularity of shape as to suggest the changeableness and spatial freedom of the dreaming mind. The exception to this rule are few and entirely explainable I will grant, for instance, the iron-walled torture chamber of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ portraits the very reverse of spatial freedom, and that it is painfully angular in character, the angels growing more acute as the torture intensifies. But there is very good allegorical reason for these things. The rooms of ‘Ligeia’ or ‘the assignion’ symbolize a triumphantly imaginative state of mind in which the dreamer is all but free of the so—called ’real world'. In ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, the dream is of quite another kind; it is a nightmare state in which the dreamer is imaginatively impotent, and find no refuge from reality, even in dram. Though he lies on the brink of the pit, on the very verge of the plunge into unconsciousness, he is still unable to disengage himself from the physical and temporal world the physical oppresses him in the shape of lurid graveyard vision: the temporal oppresses him in the form of an enormous and deadly pendulum. It is altogether appropriate, then, that this particular chamber should be constricting and cruelly angular.”

Fantasy, Elven

(1) John Michel, “The flying saucer vision – The holy grail restored”, Sphere Books 1974; “Although similar to men in appearance, fairies were of a different order of existence to the human race. This is illustrated in the Irish story of the Priest, riding home one evening, who saw a little man by the side of the road. The man said he had an important question to ask him, whether there was any mention in the Bible of the possibility of Redemption for the fairy people. The priest drew out his Bible and answered, ‘there is only Redemption for those of the seed of Adam’. Whereupon from the bogs around arose the sound of all the fairies lamenting. / From this is evident that fairies were of a different origin to men. But their peculiarly sinister character derived from their lose similarity to ordinary people, which made it possible for them to infiltrate human communities without being detected.”

Vervreemding, Kolonialisme

(1) J.H. Boeke, “Indische Economie – I De theorie der Indische Economie”, H.D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon 1947; “The economic contact to be handled here is Western. The Western group uses means [agreements, exchange, money] that are familiar to it, creates organization and connections in its mind and forces the other party to adapt to them; in that contact she forms the active and dynamic element. / The Western group referred to here is purely economic in nature; to explain its presence in the colonies only from an economic point of view; its purposes are purely economic. / Its members have the characteristics of being an alien. / He now, who acts economically as a foreigner in the colonial environment, shows the purest characteristics of capitalism. He has broken away from many traditional ties, which knit and moderate him in his own environment; the thirst for profit is unmixed and unhindered; he can give himself fully to the attainment of his economic ends, concentrate his interests thereon. The above applies in particular to the import forces, which ended at productive age to the Indies, and which are therefore also called the tractors with a sign and the term. The peasants, who are also part of the Western group, who were born and raised in the Indies, the stayers, show the abovementioned characteristics much less strongly and are therefore unable to compete economically with the import forces, the tractors. They want to be Westerners, want to differ from the indigenous people. They therefore live in the western environment as much as possible. However, they are instruments of Western society, rarely its members, and as instruments they threaten to be gradually supplanted by the progressive aristocrats from indigenous society, who through energy and intelligence above the masses have acquired a Western conception of life. This Indonesian group has remained free from the feeling of inferiority which depresses the Indo-European, because its representatives feel more like predecessors, pioneers of their own people than instruments of Western society. Moreover, these pioneers are strong, because their desires are modest, because they form a selected upper layer and because they are more familiar with and have more of an ear for the eastern environment. In the western management of Indonesia and its people they conquer a gradually growing share, in the present more in the government services than in the economic exploitation. /

(2) Passim: In this latter respect, the great majority of them are not yet able to cope with another part of the Western group, the foreign Orientals, mainly the Chinese, who exhibit different characteristics which also characterize the importing forces of the United States, and are therefore more suited to economic performance and nested in the places left open by the indigenous population and the Western entrepreneur during colonial development. These strange Orientals are also purely economically oriented in Indian society; Because of their lesser pretensions they are lighter with the indigenous population, adapt easily to them, but under all circumstances they remain representative of the capitalist way of life. Supported by clan solidarity and numerical strength, they created a barrier that was difficult to conquer and strengthened a barrier that was difficult to overcome, determined by energetic Indonesians who wanted to progress economically. . All the Chinese are already three times as numerous in Java and Madura, and in the extern provinces more than thirteen times as numerous as the Europeans. At the beginning of this chapter it has been pointed out that the economic contact between East and West in colonialism is Western in nature and therefore foreign to the essence of Eastern society. Meyer Ranneft points to a further consequence of this in an articulated popular displacement on Java [magazine Binnenlandsch Bestuur 1915]. usually he is not forced to leave a society to whose economic structure he has become accustomed. for this reason even the desaman, if the grower of rice and second crop yields too little for him, first try to find the necessary additional merits in the native traffic management: as a retailer, as a craftsman or in the culture of the local market. However, the opportunity for these firms is limited, and only the most likely succeed in the competition. Only the economically strong know how to clamp themselves down in such a way that they are not swept along by the current, the sags are drowning irresistibly in the western waters. /

(3) Passim: Thus arises the peculiar phenomenon that the least skilled, the economically weakest of the people must undertake the greatest step: they come from their closed household directly into the capitalist, while the stronger among them can maintain themselves either in the village economy or in the Eastern favor. It is clear that this fact of the expulsion of the Western contact on the Eastern convergence must be of the greatest significance, that it increases the chance that this contact does not strengthen for the benefit of that society. And it makes it understandable that the village community, which is If contact is deemed disadvantaged and injured, then reigns by attempting to hinder its progress. / The village community in its intact guise is, also economically, a world in its own right, which is in equilibrium, where production and consumption, demand and supply, are so opposed to each other that all the members differed a little, albeit most modestly, prosperity and satisfy their limited necessities of life. there are farmers, fishermen, perhaps craftsmen in the various villages, who exchange their products with each other and thus only find their existence. / But now the outside world continues to appreciate only these village achievements or products and want to pay more after the village housekeeping gives. for the moment this enriches some merchants, which impoverishes certain producers, but it impoverishes the village community, which cannot compete with the outside world and sees its consumption fund shrink. If this community realizes this and is vigorous enough, it can resist this disruption of its economic equilibrium. "

Partijopbouw, nationalisme/internationalisme

(1) Div., “Zur ideologischen Entwiklung der KPD und ihrer theoretisch ARbeit von 1919-1923“, Ernt-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald – Sektion Marxismus-Leninismus 1974 – Hannelore Pallus, „Zum ideologischen Kampf der KPD bei der Meisterung der dialektik von Internationalen und nationalen während des Ruhrkonfliktes 1923“; “ In the Ruhr conflict the bourgeoisie tried to lure the workers' class with the help of the Nationalism and to make them incapable of the revolutionary struggle to enforce the position of proletarian internationalism. Lenin wrote in 1918 that patriotism was 'one of the deepest guides', 'which is rooted in the centuries and millennia of separate existence of the different fatherlands'. Everything was done by the imperialists to shamefully abuse this patriotic feelings of the working people, their bond with their own nation, and to treat their own imperialist class interests as national interests. / The task of the comrades of the KPD was to expose the hypocritical patriotism of the bourgeoisie and to prove their legal betrayal of the nation. Courageously accused e.g. C. Zetkin in her address to the Reichstag on 7-3-1923 the bourgeoisies as traitors to the country. Also in her speech at the 8th party congress and in the article For Germany’s national right to live’ she took a passionate stance against the treacherous policy of the lords of the concerns and uncovered her 'conical backgrounds. Karl Radek, too, in presentations at the expanded executive committee, meeting in Moscow in June 1923, exposed the fractional character of pretended bourgeois patriotism and contrasted it with genuine national action of the working class in unity with proletarian internationalism.

(2) Passim: The American historian Werner T. Angress said in his anti-communist work 'Die Kampfzeit der KPD 1921-1923', written in German in 1973, that Radek only confused his listeners with the distinction he made between bourgeois nationalism and 'revolutionary national interest of Germany. Obviously it is unpleasant to see the betrayal of the bourgeoisie against the interests of the nation so exposed. The clear, classes-like juxtaposition of bourgeois profit and class interests and national interests and thereby also rejecting the consideration of the national question as a class question, he even goes so far as to declare German nationalism to be a potential revolutionary force. However, as Angres wants us to believe in his book, the KPD has never established itself with nationalism, let alone seen it as a 'revolutionary force'. it adhered much more to Lenin's statement: 'If the proletariat was to be served, it must unite the workers of all nations and fight against bourgeois nationalism, both its' own' as well as the foreign. "

Revisionisme, Bureaucratie

(1) Div. “Grundlagen des Marxismus-Leninismus – Lehrbuch“, Dietz 1963; “ The bourgeois state owns bureaucratism. Under the conditions of capitalism, bureaucratism is a management system in which the power lies with administrative officials, who are isolated from the people, are in fact not controlled by them and who take care of the interests of the exploiting classes. Of course, bureaucratism is not inherent in the state of the labor market; because this state is created by the masses themselves, serves them and is under their control. In spite of this, after its victory the workers’ class has to fight the battle against bureaucraticism for a long time to come, especially such manifestations as formalism and heartlessness. Lose it off from the masses and slouching. Bureaucratism leads, especially against such manifestations as formalism and heartlessness, detachment from the masses and wasteful bureaucrats. Excesses under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat are remnants of the capitalist system. In addition, one must not forget that the bureaucratic rationalism in the transition from capitalism to socialism finds a breeding ground in the cultural resilience of the lower-middle-class strata of the population. The bureaucratic phenomena can and are and are temporarily even strengthened when the people’s control over the state apparatus weakens, if we don’t use the just control over the work in various forms to the most controversial one and to realize them consistently. The democracy, which is inherent in the dictatorship of the proletariat, creates all the necessary conditions for a successful overcoming of the bureaucratic tendencies by always comprehensively drawing up the powers in the management of the state and by applying various options of control from below. To use all of these conditionally – that is a most important duty of workers’ power. Lenin called ‘bureaucracy the worst inner enemy of the society that builds socialism.”

Terugval vroege tribuutheffers in late oermaatschappij

(1) Div.,  “Peoples and cultures of native South America – An anthropological reader”, Doubleday  1973 – Betty J. Meggers & Clifford Evans, “An interpretation of the cultures of Marajo Island”; “Cemetery mounds are in general larger than those built for habitation. The existence of an elaborate ritual centering on death and the belief in an afterlife are evident from the large jars manufactured for burial, and from the small bowls, probably once containing food offerings, the tangas, and animal bones found inside the burial jars. A distinction in social status is implied in the contrast between this kind of burial and other skeletal remains that were interred indirect in the earth with no protecting jar and no offerings except an occasional tanga. / This is Marajoara culture in its earliest form on Marajó. It appears fully developed, with a suddenness that makes it certain that it represents an intrusion. Its history on Marajo is one of steady decline. The pottery becomes less expertly made, the burial urns become smaller and less elaborately decorated, cremation takes the place of secondary  burial, and tangas and other burial objects cease to be made. There are small changes, but there are hints of decreasing population size, of waning governmental strength, and of increasing emphasis on individual self-sufficiency rather than division of labor. In other words, the Majorana phase, which entered the island as a higher developed culture, regressed or declined slowly to the level of simple, undifferentiated society characteristic of the earlier and later occupants of Marajó.

(2) Passim: It is of interest to examine the reason for this decline. Anthropological and archeological research has shown hat culture advances as the productivity of human labor increases. In a culture where subsistence depends on hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild plants, life is a constant food quest. All the able-bodied members of a family must devote most of their time to subsistence activity, there is no specialization of occupation except by sex and little political organization or social distinction. The semi-nomadic life that reliance on game and wild pants requires makes anything but hate most temporary kind of shelter useless. It also discourages the development or elaboration of material goods, because only a bare minimum can be transported by a people frequently on the move. Remains of the Sin tribe have not been found in the archeology of Amazonia as yet. / The discovery of agriculture transformed this way of life. By domiciling plants and making them work for him, man was able to increase the fruits of his labor intensively. With a reliable source of food for daily needs and a surplus of feasts or to store against the possibility of future want, there was no longer any need for everyone to devote all his time to food getting. Some of it could be spent on making life more convenient and comfortable. Permanent dwellings and larger population concentrations were possible.

(3) Passim: This produced changes in social organization, with the development of social stratification and the beginning of division of labor by occupation. Women no longer had to spend their days in search of wild roots and fruits, and could devote the time left over from household duties to the perfection of their skill in weaving, pottery making, and basketry. Ritual was elaborated and directed toward placing the spirits of the forces of nature that could assure the success of the harvest. Slash-and-burn agriculture makes possible the beginning of all these things. In dryer areas, like Peru and Mexico, where agriculture could be intensified, the cultures continued to develop and differentiate. In these areas, tribes grew into confederacies and empires, with rigid social classes, great bodies of governmental and religious officials, as well as craftsmen and specialist of all types, none of whom contributed to subsistence activities. A necessary adjunct of this division of labor was elaboration of mechanism of distribution. The sprits of nature evolved into fearful gods: great temples were erected, and scarifies were made. / In the tropical frosts, this elaboration was prevented by factors inherent in the environment. The poor soil will permit the use of a field for only a few years. Then it must be allowed to revert to forest to recover its fertility, and new land must be cleared. As that near the village ceases to be productive, the fields move farther away until it finally becomes necessary to relocate the villages to keep it within the practical distance of the gardens. The yield per unit of land is not sufficient to support a large number of people and villages must consequently remain relatively small. This in turn keeps the division of labor and the development of social stratification at a minimum. /

(4) Passim: The more advanced culture of the Marajoara phase was out of adjustment with the resources of the tropical forest environment. The social organization was dependent on occupational division of labor, which required a few to produce food for the whole community. Arriving on Marajo with an already highly developed social organization, the population was able to maintain this level long enough to build the large mounds and to inhabit them for an unknown length of time. Subsistence activities, however, required more time and labor than they had in the previous home of ht group and this brought a concomitant reduction in the labor available for other pursuits. The sequence was the opposite of the one just described: the division of labor decreased, the villages grew smaller, and with fewer people, les specialization, and weaker political control the culture inevitably declined in complexity. The mounds in the headwaters of the Rio Amajas, which were excavated during the 1948-49 season, probably where not occupied during the stage of the Marajoara phase. Although the pottery is inferior in the upper levels to what it was in the lower and earlier ones. It is till superior to that of any of the other phases. What finally became of the Marajoara people may be discovered through more archeological work. They may have died out or moved away from Marajo, or they may have been conquered and absorbed by the Arua, who moved to the island from Mexicana, Covina, and the territory of Amapá. /

(5) Passim: This cultural-ecological theory has two parts. It assert that 1) a society with advanced social stratification and occupational division f labor cannot evolve in t tropical forest environment where agriculture by slash-and-burn, and that 2) should such a culture penetrate into the tropical lowland, it will not be able to develop further or even to maintain the level it has already achieved, but will decline until it reaches the simplicity characteristics of existence in tropical forest tribes. There is no archeological evidence that the elaborate Marajoara phase culture evolved from the preceding Mangueira and Formaga passes on Maraja Island, instead, the evidence indicates that it arrives at the peak of its development and slowly but steadily declined.”

Aeneid

(1) W.A. Camps, “An introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid”, Oxford University Press 1969; “There is much that can justly be understood to be allusive or symbolic in the Aeneid. But this, though important, is incidental to its essential character. In essence it is a story consisting of splendid and moving episodes, organized in a strongly shaped architectural pattern, and told in language of great expressive and emotive power. This story is centred on examples of intensive and emotive power. This story is centred on examples of intense and important human experience, tragedy and vocation. And his experience is not seen in isolation, but in a theological and a historical context. The humans act and suffer in a world governed by laws and powers that are overwhelmingly stronger than they, and that these laws and powers are by human standards morally imperfect enhances the tragic quality of the human experience. The human action and suffering is moreover part of a process leading to an end in history which is felt to matter more than the fortunes of the individual humans yet so as to enhance rather than diminish their value. This end and object of the story is Rome, as the poet contemplates her greatness, and the peace among nations over which she presides, with the heightened emotions of a unique historical moment. /

(2) Passim: The idea of Rome is thus the dominant value in the Aeneid and the primary motive of its action; and many readers both in the ancient and in the modern world have been willing enough to accept this, and to find in the poem an expression not only of a man’s feeling for this country but also of the high role Rome has indeed had in history as an organizing and harmonizing and humanizing agency. It was after all only a generation after Virgil that the seeds of western Christendom were spread in the ground prepared by the Roman peace by a Greek-speaking Jew from Asia Minor who was, like Virgil, a Roman citizen. But in a world no longer sympathetic to empires some way prefer to reflect that the motive of a poem is only one of its constituents, and not always the most important. The success of Paradise Lost as  a poem, for instance, does not depend on whether Milton has had success in his avowed intention to justifying the ways of God to man. And so with the Aeneid, those who cannot enter with sympathy into Virgil’s conception of Rome may find the meaning of his poem for themselves in its complementary theme, the impact of world forces and world movement on the lives of individuals and the human qualities displayed in their response.”