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Philosophical Fragments: A new book series from Northwest Passage Books

Conference proceedings (multiple non-blind peer review), , , , , , , , , ,

Homo sum. Humani nihil a me alienum puto.

– Terence

 

Introduction

Part One: D&D

Here comes Philosophical Fragments: A new book series from Northwest Passage Books. It is a foray into literature, drama, pastiche, puppetry, and even poetry; albeit, principally and primarily, in a satirical, comic, farcical, and/or comedic light—a work of humour, in short. Which is not to say a light-hearted, innocent or childish thing: Humour can be very serious. Let me repeat it: Humour can be very serious. Got it, folks, hm? Humour can be very serious. It can deal with heavy hearts, sin, and the most adult topics, whether bodily or spiritual. For one, do ponder on how the greatest poet from my native country wrote, back in the 14th century, a nominal “comedy” dealing with God, the Cosmos, and Humankind’s Fate. Even the cruel horrors of Hell, and Heaven’s bliss, are part and parcel of his “comedy.” In Italy, we have to study Dante at all school levels: Believe me, it is no laughing matter! And yet, decades later, I am grateful to my teachers, since wisdom thrives in Dante’s Comedy. (As to why he chose this term, peruse his 13th epistle to Can Grande della Scala, ca. 1318.) But I ain’t alone: I doubt that any Italian writer isn’t in his debt, whether consciously or not. As my Scottish wife likes gibing: “Educated Italians aren’t Catholic: They believe in Dante.”

For another, read and reflect on Hugleikur Dagsson’s comics, in which no conceivable cruel excess has been spared: Mutilations, tortures, suicide, rape, golden showers, bestiality, etc. Openly and even obscenely, his humour taps into the creepiest corners of the psyche. Or meditate on how the ancient Greek virtuoso of irony, and the holy founder of my academic discipline, was condemned to death for trying to make people acknowledge that they were taking a lot of things for granted, i.e., their prejudices, for which they frequently had no well-built rational foundation—if they were even aware of those prejudices in the very first place. Naturally, I mean Socrates of Athens: Plato’s famous mentor. Socrates’ sorry destiny reminds us of the fact that not only plenty of people don’t know, but also don’t know that they don’t know, and truly don’t want to know that they don’t know that they don’t know. At the same time, as the great Elias Canetti noticed, most people cherish passing judgment nonetheless. And it isn’t always someone else who can be prejudiced: What’s your common sense? What are your beliefs’ foundations? How regularly do you reflect upon them, if ever? How would you start defining, say, “cruelty,” “humour,” “judgment,” or “good” and “evil?”

Part Two: SJ

The Socratic ‘game’ is known to be ironic, hence challenges ingrained habits of thought and action. It is ipso dicto a witty game of humour, yet also one that can be experienced as being cruel. That is why, regularly, even learned attempts at making people think are resented. (As noted, inter alia, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Vilfredo Pareto, and James Hillman, this catty resentment reaches its meanest peaks when the fostered thinking applies to spirituality and sexuality.) Who likes having to reconsider the assumptions upon which their world is built? How to cope with a world that, suddenly, has become eerily unfamiliar? Who enjoys realising that, more often than not, nothing solid stands beneath his or her assumptions, but repetition, conformity, and the ever-powerful grip of village mentality? Consider, e.g., how immediately we tend to credit people’s ire as the moral authority about humour. Why? Can’t we grasp how humour isn’t serious, i.e., non-bona-fide communication? And can’t we sense the objectively conventional, mutable, supple nature of language itself? People may well take subjective offence at sheer words, but, seriously, are words timeless facets of any absolute reality? (We may cherish “freedom,” but can’t even snap pragmatics’ airy fetters!) Or why are satirists allowed to, at the very least, “punch up,” when punching is cruel per se? And, above all, which psycho-social forces and unconscious flows stir and set all in motion?

Here appears another irony: The Socratic game is but the first step in human self-discovery, which continues once said habits of thought and action have been dislodged, and discloses a more plutonic path than the sole fencing between competing arguments. As revealed by Plato’s own use of mystical-poetic myths in his aptly rhetorical and highly logical Socratic dialogues, reason’s ultimate denouement points in the direction of un-reason: After quasi-, half-, and pseudo-rational beliefs are bracketed away, irrationality is yet to be grasped. A thorough, truly philosophical enterprise is one in which all bets are off, and all paths open to exploration, such that the profoundest recesses of the soul may have to be sensed and searched. Anything less open-ended would already be taking much, perhaps too much, for granted. Nobody may be in charge but logic, then, whilst the inquirer’s imaginative powers set the domain, which can extend well beyond or beneath those aspects of reality that are most immediate. If Socrates is the first psycho-pomp here, Jung is the chosen second. And do not be overly surprised by this twist: As Dante’s case teaches us, one must descend into the icy abyss of Hell before being able to climb up, towards the luminous vision of God. But allow me take things less hurriedly, lest the plot is lost from the very start. Rather, let’s note how several Big Names have already been dropped. As said, humour is serious business.

 

A Tale of Two Giorgio’s

Should you take a good long look at the many titles of the scholarly journals, books, and encyclopaedias to which I have variously contributed throughout my career since the 1990s, i.e., more than 200 articles, chapters, review essays, opinion pieces, etc., you would reasonably conclude that I am an outright academic animal, a founder of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Akureyri, and a blasted and grey-bearded Professor of Philosophy, which happens to be my professional title—in short, a serious person. Which I am. I can even be horridly boring, if I want to—no, it’s not a dare!

Yet, there has always been another ‘me’ too, who can’t live without humour, likes playing the fool, and has rather little self-respect. These two ‘me’s’ have coexisted in an uneasy truce for many years, especially because being the former has always seemed to require the downplaying of the latter: The Professor operates against the Clown. (Or the buffo, I should state, given my past, instructive operatic experiences at, alas, an amateur level.) A compromise of sorts between the two ‘me’s’ was finally reached or, perhaps, occurred fortuitously, a few years ago. I mean a four-tome serious book series for the biggest, very serious, academic publisher in Continental Europe, De Gruyter (now De Gruyter-Brill): Even the illustrious German publisher’s Dutch-sounding name exudes nothing but seriousness! Entitled Humour & Cruelty, I co-authored it with a serious bio-psychologist, i.e., professor Ársæll Már Arnarson of the University of Iceland, to whom I owe a huge debt of gratitude.  

Humour had entered the purview of the serious ‘me’—and of the serious Ársæll, as you can gather. But there is more. It’s not just a matter of having two sides in my soul, or more—as all of us do, whether or not we acknowledge our inner plurality. This plurality being a key theme in Jungian, analytical psychology, to which Ársæll and I have devoted considerable attention qua academics: In a serious way. If, then, when perusing my latest work, you are reminded of Freud, Groddeck, Reich, Frankl, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Copjec, Rubin, Hillman, and/or the themes and imagery characterising psychodynamics, then you’re probably ‘getting’ most things right (e.g., Philosophical Fragments comprise an unsubtle, wry wealth of pre-modern “humours:” Tears, rain, blood, wine, semen, mist, vomit, etc. Depending on each reader’s inner complexes, some of these fluids will have a more forthright emotional effect, hence revealing ipso affectu something of that reader to that reader.) But if you don’t take psychodynamics seriously, well, then your own ‘things’ might get wrong, in the end. (In the age of neuropsychology, Freud and Jung are being rediscovered and reappraised; cf., inter alia, the research conducted by Hugh McGovern et alia, or neuropsychoanalysis.) Then, do not rush and come to me crying: Go see a professional therapist, for goodness’ sake! Okay?

 

A Tale of Two Approaches

Now take a good long look at the text of footnote #25 in the first of the serious four tomes for De Gruyter’s serious book series, i.e., our serious 2022 Volume 1: A Philosophical Exploration of the Humanities and Social Sciences (p.5):

As much as we would like to reach a broader public, the academic circles are the likely recipients of our work. Also, our academic prose may be inherently limited and limiting anyhow. On this subject, the US philosopher D.F. Krell (2019, 1 and 9) claims that deeply emotional issues such as “cruelty” and “tenderness” are better expressed in a “style” that “is less formal than rigorous readers may expect and demand” in, say, “scholarly articles”.

(Cf.             Krell, David Farrell (2019). The Cudgel and the Caress. Reflections on Cruelty and Tenderness (Albany: SUNY), and Camus, Albert (2006) Conférences et discours (Paris: Gallimard))

 “Cruelty” for one, but “humour” too, can be argued to call for a conscious treatment that pursues the kind of truth which the Algerian existentialist writer Albert Camus dubbed “la verité charnelle”: The carnal truth; the embodied truth; a truth which is not reduced to, nor mutated into, a mathematical average, a cold conceptual category, an Excel spreadsheet, or even a clinical notion (Camus 2006, 345); a truth which is centred in each living person and, as such, reflects the felt side of being, the lived experience of each person, rather than the interpersonal, or even intra-personal, abstract ‘stuff’ of which all languages and much of representational thinking are made, e.g., statistics, laws, theorems, and ethical treatises.

In this respect, the Danish father of modern existentialism, Sören Kierkegaard, would have spoken of “subjective truth;” e.g., your love for your partner, your academic discipline, or your God, none of which can be reduced to or even grasped by “objective truth”, such that “2+2 = 4” or “31% of Iceland’s dentists have committed acts of wanton cruelty against animals in their youth.” (Yes, I am joking about the island’s dentists; but only to a degree.)

As pursued by the likes of Kierkegaard and Camus, germane empirical closeness to this “subjective truth” requires artistic and literary forms of apprehension and expression of meaningful, molar, human experiences that the natural and social sciences, in a sort of methodological trade-off favouring taxonomical precision and strict, telling standards of “objectivity,” cannot approach as such and, at best, presuppose throughout—most often tacitly—for their operations. This key point was already argued, inter alia, by the economic historian Piero V. Mini, back in the 1970s, whom Ársæll and I cited verbatim in our 2023 Volume 2: Dangerous Liaisons (p.103), i.e., the second tome of our series for De Gruyter:

The Inability to deal with certain aspects of reality on the part of any discipline that prizes systematization (form) is well known. The most brilliant explorations of “states of mind”, for instance, are not to be found in psychology texts but in novels. The reason is obvious. Psychology tries to explain taxonomically what is not amenable to be so explained. The novelist is free from such a delusion.

(Cf.             Mini, Piero V. (1974). Philosophy and Economics: The Origins and Development of Economic Theory (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), p.152)

The four-tome serious book series for our serious German publisher was and is a serious attempt at exploring, mapping, and grasping the many fluid meanings of “humour” and “cruelty,” their mutual assistance, and the ways in which they can fight each other. As a serious philosophical and socio-scientific endeavour, our work made use of all the serious, standard categories of thought, time-honoured methodologies, and inevitable background assumptions characterising philosophy and the social sciences, psychology in primis. And that’s that: An onto-logical approach to humour and cruelty, not an ontic one—were we to follow the esoteric terminological lead of another famous existentialist thinker of the last century, i.e., Martin Heidegger, a declared Nazi, but also the German champion of ἀλήθεια. (Alas, the world of armchair philosophy is as filled with ambiguities as that of humankind!)

The four-tome serious book series for De Gruyter was and is a synthetic and analytical account of humour and cruelty, and their many interrelations, yet not their revelation (from the Latin “revelare,” i.e., to unveil; cf., inter alia, Schopenhauer’s take on the Veil of Maya). At best, such a rich synthetic and analytical account could only point towards the deeper metaphysical and, above all, existential intuitions springing from humour and cruelty, i.e., as these real-life phenomena are experienced by an embodied person capable of complex emotional apprehension and attendant reactions. To draw near humour and cruelty in their lived import and affective authenticity, then, another, less abstract path was needed.

 

A Tale of Two Primatologies

In said four-tome serious book series for our serious German publisher, humour and cruelty had been approached methodically and studied carefully, but always from a safe, removed, cold, calculating, and cool-headed distance. Arguably we operated like Harry Harlow did when studying young rhesus monkeys getting attached to soothing, soft, fake mothers rather than food-dispensing, wire-covered, equally-fake ones. There may have been adaequatio rei et intellectus, but what of adaequatio affectus et intellectus? How can a serious inquirer step closer to the tender, throbbing, tenuous, thick, and tense psychic underbelly whence humour and cruelty emerge, typically in an ambiguous, blended way?

In line with the insightful understanding of life developed in recent decades by one of Canada’s philosophical ‘giants,’ John McMurtry, i.e., as the for-us fundamental, physical, and metaphysical reality unfolding along three mutually non-exclusive ontological planes:

(1) biological motility (e.g., the humours’ eucrasia in Galenic medicine, loss of function caused by cruel mutilations) had been duly addressed in our four-book project by way of comprehensive listing and careful assessment of extant socio-scientific studies; and

(2) conscious representational and ratiocinating thought had been similarly dealt with by dint of extensive philosophical reflection (e.g., the conceptual histories of “humour” and “cruelty” in Western culture, from ancient Graeco-Roman sources to contemporary ones);

(3) felt being, however, was largely missing from the picture, notwithstanding recurrent mentions of “feelings,” “passions,” “sentiments,” et similia. Naming these affect-based psychic phenomena and, au fond, taking them for granted while, concomitantly, keeping them at arm’s length, is not revealing them. No major ἀλήθεια could occur, in a nutshell. 

What would it be like, I ended up wondering and wanting to do, to approach humour and cruelty in the way in which, say, Dian Fossey approached her beloved mountain gorillas, or Jane Goodall her chimpanzees, i.e., getting to know each animal for the unique individual which they were, including, nota bene, their dark side? How could humour and cruelty be lived with, observed in close proximity, and recounted faithfully, in a candid, uncut, and comprehensive display of their vast, intricate, rich, and sometimes puzzling or perchance disheartening behavioural and experiential complexities, even if such a brave ethological choice should mean tolerating plenty of stench and the burning bites of noxious parasites?

The jungle, after all, is no pristine laboratory, nor a cozy office at a university. And so is lived and felt life too, at least for the near-totality of us humans: A vale of tears, i.e., yet another fluid humour, which we regularly associate with the cruelty of life itself—and far less so with laughter, e.g., the dimorphous expression whereby we cry from laughing. It is no surprise, then, that timid and petty minds resist comedic imagery reminding them of this vale, and seek refuge in rosy dreamworlds, trenchant dogmatism, and echo chambers. Still, even if uncomfortable, for ἀλήθεια to take place, the truth must come out. And that is a task with which the arts and the humanities have been entrusted since their very dawn. Discomfort too is to be shown. Thus, say, the art of comics must include Watership Down and Akira, not just prim Disney stories, which are reassuring, but also deceitful—and for a hefty profit too.

But one doesn’t need to get drenched in tears to sample cruelty. Cruelty’s association with humour is much more pervasive and prosaic than that. The unmistakably sadistic thrills of killers, avengers, soldiers, warriors, psychos, and torturers—often dramatised by novelists, playwrights, and actors in crime stories, tragedies, Westerns, sci-fi and horror movies—are obvious tokens of wry, smirking, and laughing humour’s admixture with cruelty. Outright mockery, vitriolic satire, Schadenfreude, belittling jokes, bawdy, and all varieties of morbid and taboo humour follow suit too, also when directed at oneself: Self-deprecation being as Nietzschean an example of inverted, masochistic, self-humiliating cruelty as there can be. Thus, once again, crying and laughing find a viable way to join hands and occur together.

Perhaps, only absurdism,  sharp wordplay, and childish frolics are innocent, but they can equally and as easily fail qua humour, causing their initiator/s to come across as staid and inept—yet another shade of cruelty tied to humour, whose socio-moral ‘grey areas’ might be as wide as humour itself, for people’s positive reaction can’t be guaranteed. How many times do jokes land flat? And how many times do people take offense at jokes? Not even an orangutan dressed like Kant is a sure win: “Cruelty to animals!” someone could cry, irately. Not to mention what the orangutans could complain about, should they be able to speak. Plenty of human beings, at any rate, make for very prickly primates, often and in any case. As even proverbial wisdom notes, there is no rest for the wicked: It must be a law of nature.

To make a long story short, I eventually realised that I had to try and produce art myself—and, I must add, I am lucky enough to live in a country where artistic freedom is still alive, as exemplified by Hugleikur Dagsson and his fellow Icelandic comedians. Imagination, in the far North, is, for the moment, allowed to crank up, rather than being cracked down on.

 

A Tale of Two Series

Since some annoying health issues have gradually caused me to abandon the world of music altogether, and I have never been much of a painter nor a sculptor, I resorted to the noble art of creative writing: Literature, drama, poetry, etc. A few of the experimental things which I wrote were published early on, e.g., my 2021 “Bestiarium Academicum” for the Philosophy of Humor Yearbook, the 2025 Italian-language book entitled Burloni animati in libera uscita, and the last quarter of my 2025 collection of philosophical essays for Northwest Passage Books, entitled Thinking and Laughing, which was received in a most positive way by fellow philosophers—one of them suggesting that I might well be “a comic genius who has finally, in the fullness of his maturity, realized his true calling.” (Richard Prust, “Review of Giorgio Baruchello, Thinking and Laughing, Northwest Passage Books, 2025.” Israeli Journal of Humor Research, September 2025, Vol. 13: 105—8, p.108; I am not saying he’s right; still, his positive review’s got a nice ring to it!). Most of my experiments, however, were simply jotted down and set aside. I didn’t really know what to do with them.

Anyhow, after showing some such experiments to an experienced Canadian playwright and English-literature professor, and a Croatian actor, auteur, and academic specialising in Canadian studies, and receiving the most encouraging feedback, I decided to look for a publisher. Given that, by then, I had already collaborated with Northwest Passage Books, a small Canadian imprint, I submitted a ‘bunch’ of short stories, comic dialogues, closet plays, etc. to the same publishing house, which replied, once more to my surprise, most encouragingly. Not only did they approve of the nature and aims of my writings, but embraced their style too, which echoes, inter alia, Modernist, Dada, Beatnik, and Punk art. (I leave the appraisal of my art’s quality to the readers, but I stand by its honest humanity.)

Given also that I had already six volumes of Philosophical Essays in their catalogue, and that the innate comic ideas and literary creations would not stop visiting me, we ended up agreeing on six volumes of Philosophical Fragments: The new book series at issue; and, in particular, the first volume of the same, Uncanny Soulscapes in Uncustomary Dreamscope. Collaboration with well-established photographers was secured too, e.g., California-based Armando Gallo and Poland-based Agata Wilczynska, to exploit potent visual imagery as well: For the book covers, mostly; but, also, for the interiors of the books, which aim and attempt at being genuine works of art, whether eventually successful or not as such. Rare, after all, are those works of art that turn out to be generally-acknowledged masterpieces!

Now, as I’ve just stated, “comic ideas and literary creations would not stop visiting me.” This is not equivalent to producing any half-decent literature—and whether or not such a tried literature conveys the full gamut of tangles between humour and cruelty that Ársæll and I accrued and addressed in our books. Therefore, I want to share with you a process which I call “the cocktail-shaker method.” As unscientific as it is, it should be of interest to human and social scientists researching the topic of creativity. Take a good look at its concise rendition in the books’ introductions—I always show most of my cards right away: 

  1. Numerous starting scenarios and imaginary settings were supplied by oneiric experiences, i.e., dreams et similia, as peculiar as they may be at times.
  2. Germinal theoretical insights were implanted by deliberate associations with specific philosophical concepts, names, attitudes, disputations and/or schools of thought. Some insights are central to the texts, others are minor or tangential.
  3. Most works toyed extensively with at least one identifiable rhetorical trope, as per my classification of rhetorical tropes in my volumes five and six for NWP Books. I can never recall the tropes’ names, and that is why I made a list for myself.
  4. Further esprit was injected by inserting musical puns in the titles of the stories, sketches, and dialogues themselves. (Nothing too highbrow, I hope.) In a few cases, the puns inspired or even guided the contents of the works at issue.

Two more chief imaginative axes were also followed closely in each and every short story, brief sketch, and mini-dialogue… [T]hese two additional chief imaginative axes are not revealed hereby to the reader… lest the quintessential and much-desirable fun of inventive hypothesising, wild speculation, interpretative guesswork, clever detection, self-revelatory blunder, and playful disagreement is stupidly spoiled ab ovo.

Dreams + philosophy + rhetoric + musical references + two secret ingredients, like Coca-Cola… It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Besides, if artificial intelligence (AI) can do all this, so can we. With the difference that AI cannot feel anything, whereas we can. Moving closer to the muddy, ambivalent, dark psychic domain whence humour and cruelty germinate can thus become an intricate, exhausting, and taxing task, as well as a rewarding and exciting one. It is no surprise, then, that timid and petty minds resist intellection requiring all such efforts. For example, there are more and more people offloading their mental agency onto AI’s ‘marvels.’ Who knows, maybe political processes will be automated in the same manner!

 

A Tale of Two Sides

Part One: Be Wary. Be Wise

Not when the truth is filthy, but when it is shallow, doth the discerning one go unwillingly into its waters.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

One note of caution. humour and cruelty bring along an ungainly load of spiritual tensions and—let’s be brutally honest about it—outright moral evils, that cannot be avoided, edulcorated, underplayed, neglected, sidelined, censored, cancelled, shushed or ignored altogether. All such shadows and attendant shadow-contents, including humour’s ones, sport ugly looks, muddy boots, sweaty armpits, dirty orifices, crusty eyes, messy hairdos, bad manners, foul language, prejudiced attitudes, very long nails and, recurrently, the sharpest of teeth. Laughing and lacerating are very ancient siblings, and the series Humour and Cruelty concluded that this family relationship is alive and kicking. What is more, this family relationship may well be archetypal, akin to the Oedipal complex. Be wary. Be wise.

As stated at the beginning, writing works of humour does not mean to engage in a light-hearted, innocent or childish task: Humour can be, and has been, very serious. Literature and drama are time-honoured paths into the most arcane and archaic murky substrata of the human psyche, also when dealing with humour—hence not solely with cruelty, which is much more obviously notorious a notion than the former. Think of Anglophone satirists such as Swift, Huxley, and Vonnegut; or comedians such as Carlin , Glaser, and Silverman; not to mention masters of shock such as Cleese, Page, Welsh, Baron-Cohen, Cho or Tolev. Or non-Anglophone artists such as Fo, Rame, Breillat, Eco, von Trier, Schwab, and Pasolini.

In the Philosophical Fragments at issue, the reader does surely encounter all manners of clowns, buffoons, quipsters, wits, and funny characters. Such comic creations are primary and prevalent throughout the new series. At the same time, there appear con men, bigots, reprobates, thugs, killers, haters, prigs, and fishy characters. Such ungainly creations are secondary and subordinate, but not altogether absent; and neither are omitted altogether crude, lowly, painful, raw, unsettling, dark, necessary tokens of their cruel taunts and cruel misdeeds. The monkeys on my back are humour and cruelty. And if primates don’t kick-start your imagination, then think of patrons after a few pints. In pubs and at the dinner table, sometimes, masks do come off and personae dematerialise. Or step near the magma of feeling that the persons affected by Tourette’s syndrome disclose, pointing toward the grim psychic strings attached to the allegedly innocent straitjackets of mores, morality, and good manners. That is the vivid, fluid, red-hot, thoroughly human, and yet at times, terribly inhuman, cruel, lived authenticity that my works aim at exploring. Again: Be wary. Be wise.

If the reader suspects, fears or knows that philosophically- and/or scientifically-inspired fictional worlds, words, and/or strings of words may trouble, torment, traumatise or trigger him/her, then s/he should better abstain from reading any Philosophical Fragments—and so stay on the safe, well-lit side of his/her psychic life. Not all hearts were made to delve into the soul’s dark arcana. Some persons, in particular, cannot stand the sight of other people wearing no socially-sanctioned masks, possibly since such a sight might awaken buried parts of themselves, or even merely suggest that such an ungainly pelf may hide therein. Thus, my books’ introductions warn the readers redundantly in order to avoid harm, errors, pains, and futile aggravations and aggression. I have no interest in exploiting shock value; but I have it in exploring the affective valence of shocks, since such a valence may indeed reveal the make-up of deeper, opaque, maybe archetypal, psychic layers. Be wary. Be wise.

After perusing my introductions, only gravely unthinking readers and dishonest ones could experience and/or engage in any such  harm, errors, pains, and futile aggravations and aggression.

(1) The former lot would miss or misread unintentionally the repeated warnings at issue, hence misunderstanding aims, tones, nuances, ironies, metaphors, and symbols, or taking things out of context. Literalism leads to mistakes and misrepresentations, and reveals pedantry’s cruel ironies; e.g., Stieg Larsson being accused of “misogyny,” and Agatha Christie of inciting murder; mention confused with use, studies with stances, fictions with facts. It is a rather tragicomic endpoint—as cruelly unleashed by defective intellect and/or imagination. Ironically, such defects have provided comic fodder since Aristophanes’ day.

(2) The latter lot would do the same, but intentionally, led by sectarianism, spleen, spite and/or sport. So, say, an expressed or explored taunt is claimed to be an endorsed one; or a root, branch or tree is obsessed about, without looking at, or knowing, the whole forest, which stands all around and throughout the particular item that is being obsessed about. The arts are to enact “fictions” and “play,” yet ill-humoured people can still behave cruelly. It is an immoral logic—as only to be expected from defective integrity and/or inclusiveness. Cruelly, such defects have prospered in today’s clickbait-aimed social- and mass media.

What is worse, some of these people can easily convince themselves that their cruelty is praiseworthy: It is no surprise, then, that timid and petty minds can excel in what Sartre called “bad faith.” Hence, ponder on the horrible trials faced by Franca Rame, Dario Fo, or Pasolini’s tragic death. To say nothing of the more recent case of Charlie Hebdo. In these situations, anything can become a cruel excuse: Sex, race, age, class, faith, or lack thereof.

Part Two: Know Thyself

Everyone has felt (at least in fantasy) the erotic glamour of physical cruelty and an erotic lure in things that are vile.

– Susan Sontag

Meeting such sorrows, as well as the uncouth and sometimes biting ‘bits’ associated with the phenomena at issue in Humour and Cruelty and the new book series, is part of the price that must be paid for the sake of pursuing a candid and comprehensive artistic, intellectual, spiritual, and personal—i.e., as ‘pertaining to persons,’ not as ‘pertaining to me’ and, even less so, as ‘pertaining to the persona,’ i.e., that small, orderly, squeaky-clean fragment of the ego which people show intentionally to others—engagement with both humour and cruelty qua legitimate theoretico-philosophical, socio-cultural, and lyrico-literary matters. “Warts and all” would make an apt phrase, apropos. Or, as a far-less-than-angelic Milton would have jibed back in Illinois in the 1970s: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

What is more, the purchased lunch may consist entirely of entrails, which many people can’t stomach. Yet, heed should be paid to Jung’s medically-informed and insistent claims whereby if “[w]e have no imagination for evil… evil has us in its grip” and, therefore, it is paramount that we dare and become capable of “[k]nowing [-]our own darkness,” insofar as it “is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people,” i.e., all of us (as cited in the 2024 fourth tome in the serious books series for De Gruyter, i.e., Humour and Cruelty, Volume 3/2: Laughing Matters – Theses and Discussions, pp. 279 & 298). Clearly, Ársæll and I paid heed to Jung’s advice; and I kept doing so in my Philosophical Fragments: The archetypal depths might be sounded via humour too, not just old myths and tragedies, with which humour shares a telling touch of irrealism—for the sake of a deeper realism.

Literature and drama, as stated, are time-honoured paths into the most arcane and archaic murky substrata of the human psyche, and their ultimate rationale is that humankind can benefit, and has benefitted, from having such paths at its disposal. Overall, compared to ignorance, culture has been a boon, even if a very painful one at times—especially when it requires its recipients to make an effort and think actively about feelings and emotions, rather than being told by a teacher or priest what to do with them. Not to mention being the blind jumping puppets controlled and commanded by such inner drives. That too can be the case, particularly as regards knee-jerk reactions, moral panics, and hysteria. But as Jungian psychology suggested, similarly-potent inner drives are likely to lurk even deeper. Nobody is immune or superior to them: “Know Thyself” means abundant self-examination, which is something that, inter alia, most contemporary social scientists eschew ab initio and ex methodo by relying on so-called “perceptions,” “attitudes,” and Likert scales: If the persona is but a mask, and a sliver of the whole, people shouldn’t be taken at face value.

Steeped in the study of philosophy and analytical psychology, my chief task as a creative writer has neither been teaching nor preaching, but offering a plurality of vivid avenues for active imaginings and keener reflections, i.e., if the readers are willing and able to do that. Sometimes, in fact, seeing the world from different angles is beyond people‘s capacities, especially when their lives are spent focussing solely on their psychic personae. And yet, if my Philosophical Fragments can foster anything useful at all, it is precisely such capacities. Prima facie, I merely provide silly stories and quaint dialogues concerning humour and cruelty. If thought of and amplified, though, these stories and dialogues can open new and, perhaps, existentially and ethically enriching vistas on each reader’s affective make-up, as well as on the human condition at large, which is not the same condition as the angelic one, nor that of the blessed souls in Heaven—warts and all, again, would apply most aptly. It is no surprise, then, that timid and petty minds resent all art touching on our warty shadow.

Thus, I must repeat the warning that opened this subsection: Be wary. Be wise. Philosophy can be fun—notedly when clothed in comedic garb—but it’s still Socrates’ ironic brainchild. 24 centuries after his cruel death, Socrates still leads us to challenge our own conformism, reiterations, and village mentalities. Why do we think what we think? What supports our values and tastes? Whether it is glimpsed or not, the “plurality of vivid avenues for active imaginings and keener reflections” built within and on my Philosophical Fragments poses just such interrogatives. If you can dare be Socratic, you are bound to find them of interest. Then, once the Socratic game has been played, the Jungian one can be added to it, for further layers of psychic reality open up beneath the ego’s purview, with which the mind, the Self, all typologies of consciousness, and personality are often mistakenly conflated. Yet, to appreciate the ego’s serious as well as ludicrous limitations, it is enough to recall the times when we laugh without intending to, or despite one’s attempts at self-restraint, and the common phenomenon whereby imbibing alcohol makes things seem so much funnier.

 

Concluding Remarks

A civilization without humor prepares its own funeral.
– Jacques Maritain

After this dubious triumph of Donald-Trump-like self-centredness, I’ve got a humble and humbling caveat: I did not write all of this stuff in the pursuit of riches and literary glory.

Northwest Passage Books, as was stated, is a small Canadian imprint, with limited reach and circulation. At the same time, it is enough to ponder on the number of books that get published every year to gauge how unlikely it is that any of my efforts, literary as much as scholarly, will be remembered, or even merely noticed by anyone else—yet the same crux applies to all extant writers, academics, and researchers too. Rather, I wrote all of this stuff because I had to. It was a compulsion, an urge, a potent and patent yearn: A “will within the will,” as Jung would style it. It was a need—spiritual, personal, and only secondarily professional; even if it may well be some of the best stuff that I will have written in my life. (I state this whilst fully aware of my character qua ever-tentative English-language writer.)

As to the “riches”-related part of the picture, all royalties from the sales of my books, as long agreed with Northwest Passage Books, go to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. I know and trust the Society, with whom my family has had a long history of service, and I have never forgotten how penniless my wife and I were when we lived in Canada, where we both did our PhD studies. For years, I kept this aspect of my agreement with Northwest Passage Books confidential, but I later discovered that, by mentioning the charitable component of my endeavours, there would follow more sales, and, as a result, more funds to be gifted to said Society, which, basically, feeds the hungry, clothes the disrobed, and shelters the indigent from exposure to icy snow and scorching sunshine. So, if not aesthetically good, at least my books should prove to be ethically good.

Lastly, as regards art, each book in the new series opens with a cartoon by Thibaut Soulcié and an allegory by Lorenzo Biggi. Both artworks were created in direct connection with Humour and Cruelty. Thus, Philosophical Fragments can be approached and read as the literary and dramaturgical elaboration of the affective muddles and intellectual puzzles embedded in their creations. Moreover, as concerns the specifically “thespian” part of the picture, most texts in the series were ideated and written with the stage in mind: Stand-up acts, comedic readings, comic skits, outright farces, more formal plays, etc. The publisher has already been found; and that’s a good start. As to the rest, as usual, time alone will tell. No experiment, after all, has a foretold, univocal result, lest it is no longer an experiment.

 

 

THREE APPENDICES

Appendix #1 — From the Q&A 

Q: What exactly is the philosophical content in the farce that was performed, “Alien Day”?

A: Prima facie, the farce is just a farce: Stock characters, wild exaggerations, lewd innuendos, and minimal realism—an early-20th-century German logician stranded on the spaceship Enterprise in the 24th century does qualify. Yet, if you look up the dedicatory page in the book, you will see that the reader is told ab ovo—by no less than the book itself—that there have been four levels of interpretation “since the banquet was given”—a not-too-subtle reference to Dante’s Convivio, i.e., “the banquet“, in which the author of the Divine Comedy explained how, in addition to the literal reading of a text—the farce as the farce, in our case—there are also an allegorical reading, a moral one, and an anagogical one, i.e., one pertaining to the higher or deeper issues, e.g., theology and metaphysics.*

As regards the allegorical reading of “Alien Day”, I wrote the comic dialogue as both a satire and a parody: (1) A satire of the deluge of heated moralising discussions that followed the dropping of the “f-word” in Star Trek: Discovery—hence the leitmotif of the “ship’s steering cock” or, if you like, the “c-word”—and (2) a parody of an episode in the most popular Canadian sitcom of recent years, i.e., Catherine Reitman’s Workin’ Moms, in which a leaked picture of a penis leads to yet another deluge: Of “d-“, “c-” and “p-words”, plus as plentiful attendant jokes around the most ‘classic’ psycho-dynamic symbol, the phallus—which is thus pulled down from the grim, Derrida-esque pedestal of so many philosophers, critical theorists, gender-studies experts, and political thinkers, who neglected its ludicrous side.

And here comes the moral reading: I did not want to criticise Reitman’s work specifically, nor the comedic use of cuss words in general, but to suggest that comedies and, more broadly, humour, are healthy contexts in which we are allowed, if not even encouraged or expected, to lower the standards of ordinary politeness, which is a necessary yet exacting form of hourly psychological repression of our natural instincts, and of aggressiveness and sexuality above all. Such being also the deep wisdom of one of the three main theories of laughter and humour, i.e., Sigmund Freud’s so-called “relief theory“. In essence, humour and laughter create the opportunity to blow off some steam, vent out pent-up psychic tension, and enjoy a very telling “comic relief“. All of which is, normally, a good thing: When no lowly horsing around is allowed, but only riding high horses, bloody crusades await us.

The anagogical reading has to do with the fact that, in “Alien Day”, the “c-word” is no rude word at all, even if it is likely to be the meaning that most readers, and most of today’s audiences, would immediately associate with it—hence their urgent need for some “comic relief”. Yet, both the early-20th-century logician and the 24th-century ensign have no such qualms, notwithstanding their many other mutual misunderstandings. The “c-word”, one hundred years ago, had many other common meanings: Rooster, faucet, leader, chap, male trout, etc. God knows which meanings will be prevalent in the 24th century, when the only embarrassing moment occurs with regard to the use of the “t-word”, i.e., the captain’s middle name, “Tiberius:” Not the “c-word!” What’s more, for all the changes that semantics go through over the course of time, one thing has not changed for either character: Duty. As the conclusion of the farce indicates, both men can see what’s right and what’s wrong. Morality, unlike words that are admissible today but un-PC tomorrow, never changes. St Thomas’ Natural Law  and Kant’s Categorical Imperative persist. Moralistic fads do not.

* The “four levels of interpretation” are also a hint at Gilles Deleuze’s four senses of “sense” (aka “meaning of ‘meaning’,” in Frege’s logico-mathematical conception), as discussed in Humour and Cruelty, but not at the Q&A whence the first appendix is derived. Concisely, there are:

(1) “signification” (e.g., “Santa Claus” is ‘a long-bearded, world-travelling, reindeer-herding, obese, supernatural creature who dresses like a Coca-Cola advert and is very generous and jolly around Christmas time’);

(2) “denotation” (e.g., “Santa Claus,” contrary to popular belief, does exist and, contrary to popular belief, lives on the Caribbeam island of St Kitts: Go there and you’ll meet him/her/it, unless it is around Christmas time, which is when he/she/it is the busiest);

(3) “manifestation” (e.g., Marylin Monroe and Kylie Minogue have sung of “Santa [Claus]” whenever wishing to receive very expensive gifts from their admirers, partners or lovers); and

(4) “expression” (the precondition shared by all three previous senses, i.e., the verbalisation-cum-conceptualisation of “Santa Claus,” whereby a previously-indeterminate ‘chunk’ or aspect of being, let’s call it ‘x,’ becomes “Santa Claus” proper, i.e., an act of creation).

The aforementioned “categories of thought, time-honoured methodologies, and inevitable background assumptions characterising philosophy and the social sciences” situated at the heart and throughout the body of Humour and Cruelty presupposed (4), and focussed on (1) and (2). In contrast, my Philosophical Fragments largely presuppose (1) and (2), focus upon (3), and toy with—some serious people would say “problematise”—(4). Humour and cruelty, in fact, are to be found at the threshold between verbal and non-verbal, and conceivable and inconceivable. Humour, as G.K. Chesterton highlighted, collapses “reason and unreason” (Lunacy and Letters, p. 26, as cited in Humour and Cruelty‘s Volume 2, pp. 388-389) Cruelty, as P.P. Hallie investigated, is often a paradoxical domain, where words no longer apply (e.g., “unspeakable horrors”), moral categories turn upon themselves (e.g., “you’ve got to be cruel to be kind”), and thought vanishes into affect (e.g., pain, grief, desperation, and blood lust).

In Western lore, there have been two other spheres where similar conditions are recurrent, i.e., those about which Jung wrote the following Gnostic-like lines: “The world of the gods is made manifest in spirituality and in sexuality. The celestial ones appear in spirituality, the earthly in sexuality. Spirituality conceiveth and embraceth. It is womanlike and therefore we call it mater coelestis, the celestial mother. Sexuality engendereth and createth. It is manlike, and therefore we call it phallos, the earthly father.” (“Fifth Sermon to the Dead,” as also referred to in Volume 3/2 of Humour and Cruelty: Laughing Matters, p. 84 footnote 438.)

As investigated inter alia by Wilhelm Reich in the 20th century, communication between lovers does frequently revert to broadly animal/istic forms (e.g., moaning, biting, licking, grunting, scratching, etc.), challenges quotidian moral standards (e.g., nakedness, dirty talk, name-calling, rituals of aggression/submission,  etc.), and actively tries to let thought vanish into affect (i.e., sexual ecstasy). If frustrated, though, Reich deemed such behaviours bound to become excessive, pathological, and cruel. Spirituality is, today, not as well-known in the West as it once was; hence, its speechless, topsy-turvy, and ecstatic moments make here less-helpful examples of that “underbelly” whence, as said, humour and cruelty emerge, often conjointly: Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle is less well-known than Erika Mitchell’s 50 Shades of Grey (selling more than 150 million copies, Mitchell is still one of Britain’s most successful writers). Besides, “humour” proper has been more commonly associated with sexuality (e.g., rude jokes, risqué comedies, etc.) than spirituality, although modernity might be in the process of changing that (cf., e.g., the advocacy by Laude, Sparks, Gilhus, Edgar, and others).

 

 

Appendix #2 — From the books 

[I] Warning and Safety Information Regarding the Use of Philosophical Books

(Controlled by A.I.)

 Read carefully before handling.

Philosophical books are intended for embracive intellectual engagement, exhaustive socio-historical exploration, erudite moral edification, expert argumentative education, as well as extensive conceptual complexification and nuanced logical reasoning, and eventual spiritual and personal enlightenment. Improper use may result in psychological harm, uncontrolled knee-jerk reactions, unpleasant humbling and nagging self-doubt, and general embarrassment before one’s social peers or oneself. Consult a qualified philosopher before initiating any activities involving such books.

Indications

Philosophical books are indicated for:

  • Building theoretical structures, logical avenues, and hermeneutical pathways.
  • Providing stable argumentative buttressing as much as its opposite.
  • Serving as means of overall critical thinking and creative ideational imagining.
  • Digging deep into the most profound layers of psychic, social, and ontological reality.
  • Occasionally being used as paperweights (with caution).

Contraindications

Avoid handling philosophical books if you:

  • Are barefaced, concerned with wearing fashionable clothing, or otherwise inadequately willing to reconsider your worldview and guiding values.
  • Are prone to resent having unexpected insights challenging your ingrained habits.
  • Believe yourself “very clever” without external verification.
  • Think of knowing already what is right and what is wrong, and how the world goes.
  • Resist imagery, intellections, and investigations of dark, scandalous or thorny issues.
  • Intend to use philosophical books as page-turners, juggling props, or facile conversation starters by tossing them in the air, towards the clouds where Socrates is currently said to live and conduct the business which he started 24 centuries ago.
  • Are unsupervised and/or showing signs of bad digestion or recreational boredom.

Warnings

  • Impact Hazard: Philosophical books are deep and heavy. Impact with traditions, expectations, habituations, or other tacit givens and presuppositions may result in expressive feats of communication unsuitable for prim professional environments.
  • Gravity Risk: Philosophical books are subject to gravitational forces at all times. Never place philosophical books in elevated positions where they may later remember gravity and attempt to emulate the legendary apple which fell onto Newton’s head.
  • Cutting Precaution: Reading philosophical books subtler than your intellectual acumen or interpretative legerdemain may lead to rage, resentment, regret, and rabies. People can fail to understand what they do not understand. Hence, they react with cruelty.
  • Do Not Ingest: Philosophical books are not food for the body, but for the soul. Do not attempt to eat, lick, or taste philosophical books, even if they appear smooth, pretty, enticing, or surprisingly pumpkin-like.
  • Do Not Copulate: Philosophical books are not carnal mates, but spiritual ones. Do not attempt to eat, lick, or taste philosophical books, even if they appear smooth, pretty, enticing, or surprisingly pumpkin-like.

Potential Side Effects

Common side effects may include:

  • Dusty shelves.
  • Mild exertion.
  • Feeling of accomplishment (if used as intended).

Serious side effects may include:

  • Bruised egos.
  • Mental collapse.
  • Sudden appreciation for interminable dialogue.
  • Acoustic disturbance caused by loud exclamations following new thoughts.

Interactions

Avoid combining philosophical books with:

  • Reckless enthusiasm.
  • High shelves.
  • Minors under the age of “knowing better.”
  • Anyone shouting, “Wake up!,” “Woke!,” or “Micro-aggression!”

Storage

Store philosophical books in a cool, dry place. Do not store philosophical books on unstable surfaces, sloped terrain, or directly above your motorcar, especially if you are driving it.

If adverse effects occur, discontinue interaction with philosophical books immediately and seek swift assistance from a responsible literate adult, elderly cultured relative, God, or a licensed academic philosopher.

 

[II] Positionality Statement

The ultimate author of this book acknowledges that he can be perceived as being a person of advantage and/or privilege writing, inter alia, about the experiences of marginalised or oppressed persons and other living creatures. Since such persons and living creatures are in fact this book’s fictional characters and fantastic creations, which are based on the ultimate author’s human, all-too-human, sorely-limited, and ever-evolving, ever-imperfect intellect, imagination, and information, including influential oeuvres by prior writers, playwrights, philosophers, and artists, the reader is hereby humbly beseeched to show this book’s ultimate author the same charitable understanding received by such prior writers, playwrights, philosophers, and artists. Consider, for example, the ensuing inspirational writers, playwrights, philosophers, and artists:

Alain de Botton

Albert Camus

Alberto Moravia

Alexander Zinoviev

Anaïs Nin

André Dinar

Andrea Dworkin

Anita Phillips

Anne Desclos

Artemisia Gentileschi

Arthur Schopenhauer

Blaise Pascal

Brendan Myers

Cardi B

Carl Gustav Jung

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Catherine Breillat

Catherine Reitman

Catullus

Charles Ives

Charlie Hebdo

Charlotte Roche

Chris Kraus

D.H. Lawrence

Daniil Kharms

Dante Alighieri

Dario Fo

David Foster Wallace

David Hume

David Lynch

Diane Morgan

Dino Buzzati

Eminem

Fabrizio De André

Flavio Baroncelli

Franca Rame

Friedrich Nietzsche

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

G.K. Chesterton

George Carlin

Gesualdo Bufalino

Giacomo Leopardi

Gianni Rodari

Giuseppe Marzari

Grazia Deledda

H.P. Lovecraft

Hannah Gadsby

Iris Murdoch

Irvine Welsh

James Joyce

Jean-Paul Sartre

John Cleese

Jon Stewart

Kathy Acker

Lars von Trier

Lenny Bruce

Luigi Pirandello

Machado de Assis

Matt Stone

May Sinclair

Mike Judge

Mikhail Bulgakov

Nikolai Gogol

Peter Paul Rubens

Philip Paul Hallie

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pierre Guyotat

Quentin Tarantino

Richard Pryor

Richard Rorty

Ricky Gervais

Roberto Benigni

Sacha Baron-Cohen

Sarah Silverman

Sören Kierkegaard

Spike Lee

Stieg Larsson

Suzy Eddie Izzard

the ‘Divine’ Marquis de Sade

Thomas More

Trey Parker

Umberto Eco

Vilfredo Pareto

Voltaire

Wahida Clark

Werner Schwab

William Shakespeare

Witold Gombrowicz

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Želimir Žilnik

 

 

Appendix #3 — Some food for thought

Philosophical Fragments presuppose throughout their creation and circulation both artistic freedom and academic freedom, which are enshrined in sacred national constitutions, binding institutional charters, and countless official documents; but remain under attack in today’s world, from the right and the left of the political spectrum, as also appraised and argued by a celebrated, courageous champion of free speech: Salman Rushdie. As political, religious, and moral polarisation increases—fuelled by social-media clickbait logic—while the average citizen’s and university student’s critical skills decrease—curtailed by AI and over-reliance on IT shortcuts—making people think is all the more paramount. After all, tyrannical regimes always try to stifle education, especially in the humanities and the arts.*

Being able and eager to read fiction—taking the necessary time, and having the patience needed to imagine and reflect—are both prerequisites and skills to be honed. It is in this spirit that Philosophical Fragments ought to be approached and assessed. The reader may well decry the sore stylistic flaws of my new books, but not question their being serious attempts at extending humorous philosophical literature, which, as only to be expected in the 21st century, draws inspiration from all artistic and intellectual domains, highbrow as much as lowbrow, including cinema, true-crime TV, stand-up comedy, performance art, rap, critical theory, dirty blues, and postmodern thought. (Still, vast herds of equines have been brought to the proverbial well, and yet managed to die of thirst: What a cruel irony!)

* As John Stuart Mill famously acknowledged in his pivotal 1859 essay On Liberty, tyranny can come in many institutional forms and ethico-political colours, the end-result of which is the reduction or annihilation of artistic, intellectual, and comedic freedom, among many other nefarious, noxious offshoots. Thus, in the 21st century, there have abounded cases of humorists targeted by reactionary forces (e.g., the 2010 assault on Kurt Westergaard in Denmark, the 2015 killings of the Charlie Hebdo staff in France, the South-Korean blacklist of artists publicly revealed in 2016), as well as progressive ones (e.g., the “cancelling” or ostracisation of ‘controversial’ figures such as Shane Gillis and Dave Chappelle in the US, Graham Linehan and Ricky Gervais in the British Isles, and Lisa Eckhart in Germany). Even the ‘safe’ Nordic countries have seemed to follow this pattern, in right- as well as left-wing varieties, notwithstanding their long tradition as havens for free speech (see, e.g., Per Inge Torkelsen’s ordeals in Norway and those of Kristoffer Ahonen Appelquist in Sweden). And as the same great British father of liberalism argued, more potent than any State laws in the exercise of such tyrannical powers is the murky institution of social opinion, which can mock, shun, attack, ostracise, harm, and destroy people’s freedom by so diverse means as a small clique’s gossip, a web-based smear campaign or cynical journalistic muckraking. Ironically, when it comes to  being cruel, power distributions are astoundingly egalitarian.

 

N.M.B.

If the present reader did not realise that Appendix #2 and the closing clause in Appendix #3 contain a modicum of irony, hence humour, then s/he is emphatically, energetically, and earnestly advised to abstain altogether from reading any of the books in the new series at issue. Philosophical Fragments require: (1) Tolerant openness to comic inventiveness; (2) adequate imaginative powers; (3) literal avoidance of literalism;  (4) charitable acceptance of non-serious, non-bona-fide communication (ergo et a fortiori, the refusal of dismissing humour qua humour simply because the reader felt that “it ain’t funny”); (5) willingness to seek information and context before rushing to pass judgment (or wind); and (6) Bergson’s now-canonical “anesthesia of the heart,” i.e., an effectual degree of affective aloofness, since caring passionately for x prevents acceptance of the humorous treatment of x (as both Hazlitt and Schopenhauer wryly remarked, back in the 19th century, most people stop finding comicality or humour funny as soon as it applies to them or their loved ones). Yet without neglecting (0) altogether: The reader of these books must still be able to read, which is also the only way in which one can gauge what sort of a ludicrous scribbler I am! (Hey, could it be that even this end note contains a modicum of irony, or humour? … Nah!)°

° On a less facetious note, given the global decline in literacy skills in the past few decades, the ability to read long, polysemic, self-aware, playful, grownup books may be a talent that fewer and fewer people have. This is not an elitist’s conceit, but an educator’s concern.

What Else but to Laugh?

Conference proceedings (multiple non-blind peer review), , , ,

The Comedy, the Comedy!

Mistah Kurtz, he resurrected

1. On Academia, Aeronauts, and Carbon in General

Once I was at a huge conference center abroad, attending one of the scientific conferences that were simultaneously happening at this glorious venue. As it usually is in the predestination explained by binary logic, I was aware only of my own literary conference. The awareness of others came only later but surely gloriously so.

Continue reading What Else but to Laugh? →

Thinking of the Shadow. Conceptions of Cruelty in the History of Western Thought

Conference proceedings (double non-blind peer review), , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As regards thinking of the shadow, I can contribute to the present discussion qua intellectual historian who, together with the theologian Michael Trice, has reconstructed in recent years the understanding of a particular manifestation of the shadow in the long life of Western philosophy: cruelty. Between 1998, when I started investigating Judith Shklar’s and Richard Rorty’s liberalism of fear, and 2017, when I completed a volume of collected essays of mine to be published by Northwest Passage Books under the title Philosophy of Cruelty, I devoted considerable time and attention to retrieving, mapping and reflecting upon the conceptions of cruelty developed in the history of Western thought. What follows here is a concise overview of the five most common and/or most articulate conceptions that I have identified in the course of my studies, and repeats almost verbatim what I state in the aforementioned collection of essays of mine. Longer and more detailed analyses can be retrieved in my older publications on this subject. Please note also that my research is intentionally limited to explicit uses of the terms “cruelty” and “cruel” in the languages accessible to me.  Extending it to cognates such as “violence” or “aggressiveness” would make the project unmanageable.

Cruelty as Vice

Cruelty has been regarded very often as a quintessentially human vice affecting specific individuals. This conception of cruelty is characteristic of ancient and medieval philosophers, whose approach to ethics typically centres upon the notion of personal character rather than upon the notion of rightful or good actions and norms—the latter being predominant amongst modern and contemporary thinkers. Also, this former conception of cruelty takes a chief interest in observing what consequences cruelty has for the perpetrator, rather than for its victims, as commonplace instead for modern and contemporary approaches to cruelty. In particular, ancient and medieval philosophers suggested that cruelty is a vice affecting persons involved in punitive contexts, e.g. courtrooms, schools, armies and households. In De Clementia, Seneca claims that “cruel are those who have a reason for punishing, but do not have moderation in it”.[1] Besides, he claims that, as concerns the person who “finds pleasure in torture, we may say is not cruelty, but savagery – we may even call it madness; for there are various kinds of madness, and none is more unmistakable than that which reaches the point of murdering and mutilating men.”[2] “Cruelty” is thus defined as “harshness of mind in exacting punishment”, rather than unrestrained lust for blood.[3] As a vice, ‘”cruelty” is said to be “an evil thing befitting least of all a man”,[4] and it can take private forms (e.g. family feuds) as well as public forms (e.g. tyranny, insofar as “[t]yrants”, unlike kings resorting to cruelty “for a reason and by necessity[,…] take delight in cruelty”).[5] Cruelty is the opposite of clemency, yet “it is as much a cruelty to pardon all as to pardon none.”[6] Clemency, according to Seneca, does not mean indiscriminate forgiveness, but rather a balanced blend of moderation and justice.

As famously discussed by Aristotle, our vices are said to spring from a lack of balance within the human soul; to exceed in forgiveness is as conducive to vice as to exceed in harshness. Aquinas’ Summa Theologica echoes Seneca’s position and combines it with Aristotle’s ethics:

Cruelty apparently takes its name from “cruditas”[rawness]. Now just as things when cooked and prepared are wont to have an agreeable and sweet savour, so when raw they have a disagreeable and bitter taste. Now it has been stated… that clemency denotes a certain smoothness or sweetness of soul, whereby one is inclined to mitigate punishment. Hence cruelty is directly opposed to clemency.[7]

Also for the doctor angelicus [angelic doctor] of the Catholic Church is “cruelty… hardness of the heart in exacting punishment”,[8] hence a form of “human wickedness”; whereas “savagery and brutality” are a form of “bestiality”.[9] Cruelty contains an element of rational deliberation, which “savagery” and “brutality” do not possess: these, in fact, “take their names from a likeness to wild beasts… deriving pleasure from a man’s torture.”[10] Cruelty is therefore something evil that we do intentionally and which corrupts our character by exceeding in what would be otherwise acceptable; but it is also something that we can do something else about, for all vices can be remedied by proper self-correction. As Aristotle and the medieval pedagogues used to teach, whatever the initial endowment of inclinations and talents in our character, each of us is responsible for the kind of person she becomes.

Cruelty as Sadism

The distinction drawn by Seneca and Aquinas between cruelty and bestiality, epitomised by sadistic pleasure, seems to vanish with several modern thinkers, who actually take sadism as the paramount, if not the sole, example of cruelty. This is a second, fairly common conception of cruelty, according to which cruelty turns into something worse than a vice, indeed something devilish or extreme. To some, cruelty becomes so extreme a tendency that it transforms into a sheer figment of our imagination, i.e. some kind of philosophical or literary ‘ghost’. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, argues that “Contempt, or little sense of the calamity of others, is that which men call cruelty; proceeding from security of their own fortune. For, that any man should take pleasure in other men’s great harms, without other end of his own, I do not conceive it possible.”[11] Bishop Joseph Butler, on his part, states that “[t]he utmost possible depravity, which we can in imagination conceive, is that of disinterested cruelty.”[12] David Hume, on this point, affirms: “Absolute, unprovoked, disinterested malice has never, perhaps, had place in any human breast”.[13]

The element of rational deliberation that Seneca and Aquinas observed in cruelty is adamantly underplayed in this second conception of cruelty, as Thomas Hobbes’ understanding reveals once more:

Revenge without respect to the example and profit to come is a triumph, or glorying in the hurt of another, tending to no end (for the end is always somewhat to come); and glorying to no end is vain-glory, and contrary to reason; and to hurt without reason tendeth to the introduction of war, which is against the law of nature, and is commonly styled by the name of cruelty.[14]

Rather than a vice, for which a person must take responsibility, cruelty morphs into a malady of the soul, the result of a poor, incompetent or broken mind, which reduces the humanity of its carrier and makes her closer to wild animals. Perhaps, this malady can be cured, or at least confined by appropriate measures of social hygiene. After all, animals can be tamed and trained; though sometimes they are put in cages or butchered. And the cruel human person, now likened to the beast, can be treated instrumentally, like commonly practised with horses and pigs; all this, naturally, being the case for the greater good of the commonwealth to which she and her victims belong.

Cruelty as Avoidable Harm

The idea of cruelty as something sick, if not even something sickening, colours also the work of the French Renaissance sceptic Michel de Montaigne. In his Essays, Montaigne observes that “cowardice is the mother of cruelty”[15] and states:

I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices. But this is to such a point of softness that I do not see a chicken’s neck wrung without distress, and I cannot bear to hear the scream of a hare in the teeth of my dogs… Even the executions of the law, however reasonable that may be, I cannot witness with a steady gaze.[16]

As for wars, it is worth repeating that Montaigne remarks: “I could hardly be convinced, until I saw it, that there were souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the mere pleasure of it… For that is the uttermost point that cruelty can attain.”[17] The conceptions of cruelty as vice and sadism are accounted for in Montaigne’s reflections, but they are also subtly advanced to a broader condemnation of cruelty as harm to be avoided: capital punishment might be reformed, hunting abandoned, and wars prevented. In this perspective, his contribution to the understanding of cruelty in Western history is momentous, just as momentous were his Essays for the West’s intellectuals in the three centuries following their publication, and it connects the modern conceptions with the ancient one. Moreover, Montaigne is the first Western intellectual to devote an entire essay to the topic of cruelty—a stark sign of how genuine was his hatred for cruelty. “Montaignesque” is therefore the third conception of cruelty to be presented, i.e. cruelty as harm to be avoided.

The champions of the European Enlightenment are probably the most vocal and best-remembered members of this approach. Montesquieu, for example, labels as “cruel… torture” and gruesome “punishments”, legal servitude for insolvent debtors and colonial occupation.[18] In his essays On Tolerance, Voltaire describes as eminently cruel all wars of religion, whilst in Candide he condemns as such rape, corporal punishment and mutilation, even when lawfully administered in the name of justice.[19] Adam Smith, champion of the Scottish Enlightenment, ascribes the attribute “cruel” to infanticide,[20] personal vendetta,[21] economic monopolies,[22] burdensome taxes of succession or of passage of property,[23] the suffering of the “race of labourers” in periods of economic recession,[24] and mercy to the guilty.[25] In Italy, Pietro Verri argues that “[r]eason can show [what] is unjust, extremely dangerous, and immensely cruel”—and reason led him to condemn “torture” as “cruel”.[26] Cesare Beccaria, the most influential penal reformer of all times and both a friend and a student of Verri’s, condemns torture as cruel too, whilst also noting: “man is only cruel in proportion to his interest to be so, to his hatred or to his fear.”[27] Hence, it ought to be a duty for the legislator to “[c]ause men to fear the laws and the laws alone. Salutary is the fear of the law, but fatal and fertile in crime is the fear of one man of another. Men as slaves are more sensual, more immoral, more cruel than free men”.[28] For Jean-Antoine-Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet, instead, “cruel” is the institutional neglect of “the progress of education”, for it constitutes nothing but the shameful misdeed of “abandoning men to the authority of ignorance, which is always unjust and cruel”.[29] Even the non-instrumental Enlightenment thinker par excellence, Immanuel Kant, does espouse the spirit of reformation of his age, and calls “most cruel” the institution of “slavery” exercised in the “Sugar Islands” by Dutch landowners,[30] whereas merely “cruel” are the “duels” fought in the name of “military honour”, which, like “Maternal Infanticide”, lead to cases of “Homicide” as distinguished from “Murder”.[31]

19th– and 20th-century political and legal reformers followed in the footsteps of the ‘enlighteners’ of the 18th century. Amongst them are also Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty. Judith Shklar, who was a Montaigne scholar, defines cruelty in two ways. The former reads: “Cruelty is… the wilful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear… [it is] horrible… [it] repels instantly because it is ‘ugly’… and disfigures human character”. The latter reads: “Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter.” Judith Shklar believes that cruelty, to a meaningful extent, can be controlled by appropriate doses of liberalism, which is itself in many ways a child of the 18th century: “the first right is to be protected against the fear of cruelty. People have rights as a shield against this greatest of human vices. This is the evil, the threat to be avoided at all costs. Justice itself is only a web of legal arrangements required to keep cruelty in check.”[32] Good laws and good political arrangements can reduce the pain that we impose upon/suffer from weaker/stronger creatures like us. That is the hope animating the American and the French Revolutions, as well as many of the emancipatory struggles fought during the following two centuries. Still, additional cruelties can be retrieved—and rejected—in other areas too. Giacomo Leopardi, for one, aims at a different target. He associates cruelty with the rewards and punishments awaiting us post mortem [after death], which he claims to be nothing but the sorrowful fictional creations of tragically misguided philosophies and religions. Whether “healthy or sick”, these creations are, in his view, signs of “cowardice” and mere “childish illusions” that were developed in the face of “the absence of any hope, …the desert of life, …men’s infelicity[,]… and destiny’s cruelty”.[33] Though living as such is cruel in and for itself, even crueller it is to live in fear of the priest’s gloomy superstitions or the philosopher’s hollow concepts.

Tom Regan sketches a fascinating taxonomy of cruelty, which he derives from yet another area that seems engulfed with cruelty: the human treatment of animals. As Regan writes:

People can rightly be judged cruel either for what they do or for what they fail to do, and either for what they feel or for what they fail to feel. The central case of cruelty appears to be the case where, in Locke’s apt phrase, one takes ‘a seeming kind of Pleasure’ in causing another to suffer. Sadistic torturers provide perhaps the clearest example of cruelty in this sense: they are cruel not just because they cause suffering (so do dentists and doctors, for example) but because they enjoy doing so. Let us term this sadistic cruelty… Not all cruel people are cruel in this sense. Some cruel people do not feel pleasure in making others suffer. Indeed they seem not to feel anything. Their cruelty is manifested by a lack of what is judged appropriate feeling, as pity or mercy, for the plight of the individual whose suffering they cause, rather than pleasure in causing it… The sense of cruelty that involves indifference to, rather than enjoyment of, suffering caused to others we shall call brutal cruelty…Cruelty admits of at least four possible classifications: (1) active sadistic cruelty; (2) passive sadistic cruelty; (3) active brutal cruelty; (4) passive brutal cruelty.[34]

Whichever class of cruelty we encounter in life, Regan believes that we must try to eliminate it. In particular, he focuses on (3) and (4), i.e. the types of cruelty that seem to characterise the human-animal relationship in contemporary societies. Persons are not only cruel to other persons: as long as pain is taken to be a relevant ethical factor, then also animals can become victims, and maybe even perpetrators (though Regan does not explore this avenue).

Cruelty as Paradox

As inheritors of the projects initiated in the 18th century, we can find Shklar’s and Regan’s definitions rather appealing. However, how many types of cruelty and cruel areas of behaviour can be actually tackled? How many revolutions, with their load of gunpowder and dynamite, should be fought? If three centuries of worldwide-expanding liberalism, culminated with Francis Fukuyama’s post-Cold-War proclamation of “the end of history”, have not eliminated it, what reasonable expectations can be entertained vis-à-vis the future?[35] Few are the philosophers who have pondered upon the paradoxical character of cruelty—a fourth conception that can also be retrieved in the history of Western thought. Cruelty persists within our lives and societies despite its being commonly denounced as something extremely negative and, above all, despite the recurring attempts to promote social progress and reform existing institutions. Judith Shklar herself admits that “cruelty is baffling because we can live neither with nor without it” and this is probably the reason why:

Philosophers rarely talk about cruelty… I suspect that we talk around cruelty because we do not want to talk about it… What we do seem to talk about incessantly is hypocrisy, and not because it hides cowardice, cruelty, or other horrors, but because failures of honesty and of sincerity upset us enormously, and they are vices which we can attack directly and easily. They are easier to bear, and seem less intractable.[36]

Philip P. Hallie marks a notable exception to the commonplace avoidance of the subject denounced by Judith Shklar. Firstly, Hallie defines “cruelty” as “the infliction of ruin, whatever the motives”[37] or, in two alternative versions, “the activity of hurting sentient beings”[38] and “the slow crushing and grinding of a human being by other human beings”.[39] He then distinguishes the instances of “cruelty upon humans” between those “fatal cruelties” that are due to nature and the far from uncommon “human violent cruelty” that is due to our fellow human beings.[40] To the latter he adds “implicit” or “indirect” cruelties, i.e. cruelties arising from “indifference or distraction” rather than from evident “intention to hurt”.[41] Thus understood, human cruelty can be further divided into “sadistic” and “practical”: whereas the latter refers to forms of instrumental cruelty, the former is “self-gratifying”.[42] By way of this articulate taxonomy, richer than Tom Regan’s itself, Hallie attempts to encompass and map the vast, polymorphous universe of cruelty, whose intricate nature explains perhaps its little permeability to philosophical analysis. Secondly, Hallie cuts the Gordian knot of cruelty’s intrinsic complexity by referring to it as a paradox, candidly and straightforwardly—in a book’s very title. Why simplifying something that cannot be simplified? Why misrepresenting it, in the attempt to represent it clearly? Hallie has in mind five particular cases of paradoxical cruelty:

  1. Cruelty brought about without any open “intention to hurt”, but in the name of altruism, happiness, justice, etc.[43] “Substantial maiming” can derive from “wanting the best and doing the worst”.[44]
  2. Cruelty caused by genuine “intention to hurt”, but aimed at educating and therefore avoiding worse cruelties, e.g. “in terrorem” [terrifying] literary techniques.[45] As 20th-century French literary scholar André Dinar also observes: “The cruel authors cauterise the wounds that can be healed and mark with hot irons the incurable ones, so to expose their horror”.[46]
  3. “The fascinosum [lure] of cruelty”,[47] as well as its ability to titillate “sexual pleasure”,[48] higher “awareness”,[49] the liberation of sensual “imagination”[50] and “masochistic pleasure”,[51] are all pursued willingly and proactively, very often, by fully conscious persons.
  4. Cruelty implied by the “growth” or maturing of any individual through painful “individualisation” for the sake of “human authenticity”.[52] No person becomes mature, well-rounded and responsible without facing a significant amount and variety of pain in her life, and without learning how to face probable, if not inevitable, later doses of the same bitter medicine.
  5. “Responsive” cruelty enacted in retaliation to “provocative” cruelty,[53]g. penal chastisements and just wars, although “mitigation” is recommended.[54]

Being a devout Christian, Hallie has no desire to promote cruelty. Quite the contrary, his work on this topic begins as an effort to reduce it. Nevertheless, as he deepens his understanding of it, Hallie comes to recognise that not all cruelty ought to be avoided, for its disappearance would be more harmful than its persistence. This is particularly true of the painful processes of growth and maturation, as well as of artistic disclosure of sorrowful truths or extreme sexual elation. Moreover, in an implicit reminder of Beccaria’s own wisdom, Hallie admits that cruelty may be a necessary evil in the public sphere. As baffling as this may be, cruelty seems to find rather easily assorted justifications for enduring in many aspects of life.

Cruelty as Good

Some philosophers have stepped beyond the sole acknowledgment of cruelty’s paradoxical character and entertained plainly the seemingly contradictory notion that it might be good. This is the fifth and last conception of cruelty, which comprises two main groups of thinkers.

In the first group are included those thinkers who have argued that cruelty does not need to have intrinsic value (or disvalue), but instrumental value alone and, as such, that cruelty may be capable of fulfilling a positive function. For instance, cruelty can be a tool to promote the common good. Niccolò Machiavelli is among them. According to him:

Every prince ought to desire to be considered clement and not cruel. Nevertheless he ought to take care not to misuse this clemency. Cesare Borgia was considered cruel; notwithstanding, his cruelty reconciled the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty. And if this be rightly considered, he will be seen to have been much more merciful than the Florentine people, who, to avoid a reputation for cruelty, permitted Pistoia to be destroyed [by the rioting between the Cancellieri and Panciatichi factions in 1502 and 1503].[55]

Jacques Derrida states something analogous when he writes in recent years: “Politics can only domesticate [cruelty], differ and defer it, learn to negotiate, compromise indirectly but without illusion with it… the cruelty drive is irreducible.”[56] Instead of combating cruelty at all costs, one ought to learn how to draw as much good as possible from it. After all, the initiation of social life makes itself use of cruelty: why should its continuation be devoid of it? This is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari seem to suggest, for example. The acquisition and continuation of the shared semiotic abilities that allow for human communities to develop is never devoid of cruelty. Schooling and socialisation are no free meal: “Cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them, belabouring them.”[57] Sharing a similar awareness, Clément Rosset explores the instrumental role of cruelty in the private sphere, rather than the public one, and writes provokingly: “Joy is necessarily cruel”.[58] According to him, “[c]ruelty is not… pleasure in cultivating suffering but… a refusal of complacency toward an object, whatever it may be.”[59] Now, “the ‘cruelty’ of the real… is the intrinsically painful and tragic nature of reality.”[60] For instance:

[T]he cruelty of love (like that of reality) resides in the paradox or the contradiction which consists in loving without loving, affirming as lasting that which is ephemeral – paradox of which the most rudimentary vision would be to say that something simultaneously exists and does not exist. The essence of love is to claim to love forever but in reality to love only for a time. So the truth of love does not correspond to the experience of love.[61]

For Rosset, the answer to cruelty’s paradox lays in the nature of reality, which is ultimately cruel. Rosset’s thought could then be regarded as belonging legitimately to the fourth conception of cruelty as well, i.e. cruelty as paradox. In truth, the distinction between the fourth and the fifth conceptions is not clear-cut, and the same can be said of the distinctions between the other conceptions previously presented (especially between the first and the third, and the second and the third). These distinctions are mostly a matter of different conceptual emphasis, rather than of mutual incompatibility; and as we emphasise the fifth conception, it can be stated that, to a relevant extent, persons are shaped by cruelty and are bound to encounter it also and above all if they wish to derive a modicum of satisfaction from their mortal existence. The only way to live well, for Rosset, who was a Schopenhauer scholar, involves learning to embrace the suffering that life unavoidably unloads upon us. In the field of drama, Antonin Artaud echoes and expands Rosset’s tragic awareness: “Death is cruelty, resurrection is cruelty, transfiguration is cruelty… Everything that acts is a cruelty.”[62] To be is to be cruel—there is no way out of cruelty, which, however, must be conceived anew: “Cruelty is not just a matter of either sadism or bloodshed, at least not in any exclusive way… [It] must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that is customarily given to it.”[63] Although never as clear as Rosset on what this novel understanding of cruelty may be like, Artaud developed a new set of shock- and scandal-filled stage techniques and communication devices, i.e. his Theatre of Cruelty, which was aimed at eliciting higher levels of personal awareness in the audience: “All this culminates in consciousness and torment, and in consciousness in torment”.[64]

In the second group are included those thinkers that have argued that cruelty might be intrinsically valuable, maybe even a virtue, which enriches our lives in a unique way and allows for the full realization of our nature. The most ‘in-famous’ example in this sense is that of the Marquis de Sade, who argues: “Cruelty is imprinted within the animals… that can read the laws of Nature much more energetically than we do; [cruelty] is more strongly enacted by Nature among the savages than it is among civilized men: it would be absurd to establish that it is a kind of depravity”.[65] Sade, who approves also of more refined forms of cruelty (i.e. the civilised libertine’s), infers from the naturalness and unavoidability of cruelty a reversed Rousseauvianism:

Remove your laws, your punishments, your customs, and cruelty will not have dangerous effects any longer… it is inside the civilized domain that it turns into a danger, as those capable of it are almost always absent, either because they lack the force, or because they lack the means to respond to the offences; in the uncivilized domain, instead, if it is imposed over the strong, then he shall be able to react to it, and if it is imposed over the weak, it will not be else than conceding to the strong according to the laws of nature, and this will not be inappropriate at all.[66]

Equally notorious is the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom the reader has already met repeatedly in this book. Idealising and idolising primeval societies, barbaric bravery and warrior mores, Nietzsche wishes to:

[E]mpathise with those tremendous eras of “morality of custom” which precede “world history” as the actual and decisive eras of history which determined the character of mankind: the eras in which suffering counted as virtue, cruelty counted as virtue, dissembling counted as virtue, revenge counted as virtue, denial of reason counted as virtue, while on the other hand well-being was accounted a danger, desire for knowledge was accounted a danger, peace was accounted a danger, pity was accounted a danger, being pitied was accounted an affront, work was accounted an affront, madness was accounted godliness, and change was accounted immoral and pregnant with disaster![67]

If Sade reverses Rousseau’s bon sauvage [noble savage (the term was never used by him, but is commonly associated with him)], Nietzsche reverses Seneca’s treatment of cruelty as vice. For Nietzsche, cruelty used to be a virtue in prehistoric or barbaric times, it is a fixed element in the human make-up, and it survives in countless rarefied forms today:

Cruelty is what constitutes the painful sensuality of tragedy. And what pleases us in so-called tragic pity as well as in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate of metaphysical tremblings, derives its sweetness exclusively from the intervening component of cruelty. Consider the Roman in the arena, Christ in the rapture of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the stake or the bullfight, the present-day Japanese flocking to tragedies, the Parisian suburban laborer who is homesick for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who unfastens her will and lets Tristan und Isolde “wash over her” – what they all enjoy and crave with a mysterious thirst to pour down their throats is “cruelty,” the spiced drink of the great Circe.[68]

Given all this, as Nietzsche concludes, cruelty should be recovered in an honest and healthy way, for human beings are cruelty-prone animals that live in the mundane world, not the God-like, spiritualised, ‘fallen’ and heaven-seeking creatures of which religion and philosophy have pointlessly blared about for centuries. Just like all other animals, so do human beings have bodies, selfish selves, and ‘knightly’ instincts calling for competition, predation and domination. Humans are born to race against one another and the most deserving ones, in the end, ought to survive and lead. Any departure from this natural logic is a concession to degeneration and, essentially, an unhealthily indirect manifestation of repressed cruelty, which cannot but harm our species by letting slaves dominate over masters, priests over knights, and ignorant masses over cultured elites. Instead of understanding and embracing the cruel but actual reality of the world, which is the only place where true existential meaning can be found, the degenerate pursue mystification and escapism. Exemplarily, the loathed magician/pope of Nietzsche’s grand and initially ill-received philosophical allegory, i.e. his 1883–91 Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, discovers this hard truth in his delirium, as he realises that his own pantheon of abstract instruments of power (angels, demons, God, etc.) is the utmost and most cruel betrayal of any chance for real fulfilment. Nothing of what he has been preaching during his life, in order to lead his flock, is true and truly valuable: “In vain! / Pierce further! / Cruellest spike! / No dog – your game just am I, / Cruellest hunter! /…/ Speak finally! / You shrouded in the lightning! Unknown! Speak! /…/ Surrender to me, / Cruellest enemy, / – Yourself!”[69]

Concluding Remarks

This brief overview of the five most common and/or most articulate conceptions of cruelty that can be retrieved in the history of Western thought shows already how diverse the interpretations of this term can be. Cruelty, like many other concepts that we employ regularly in our language, whether in ordinary or technical discourses, is inherently contested, i.e. it allows for a variety of readings, usages and applications. As Michael Polanyi used to argue in the 20th century, it is important for concepts to be adequately ambiguous, insofar as they are meant to grasp a plethora of subsidiary details that we are only tacitly aware of, and of some of which we may become aware by subsequent processes of analysis, elucidation, comparison, critique, reflection, study, etc. These processes may even lead to a breakdown in the applicability of the concept, which is then abandoned in lieu of alternative ones. This abandonment does not mean that the concept is mistaken or useless. Quite the opposite, a concept is correct and useful insofar as we successfully interact with other persons by referring to it, that is, by referring to phenomena by means of it. As a concept in both ordinary and philosophical language, cruelty is no exception to the way in which several conceptions can be produced of any such item, and an array of diverse realisations about human affairs can be unpacked from it by reflecting upon it—in this case, by thinking of the shadow.

 

Endnotes

[1] Lucius A. Seneca, De Clementia, translated by John W. Basore, London: Heinemann, 1928–35[55 AD], II.iv.1–4. Whenever possible, given the great variety of editions over the centuries of Latin classics, I use the standard referencing system for such sources.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid. I.xxiv.1–xxv.2.

[5] Ibid. I.xii.1–4.

[6] Ibid. I.ii.2–iii.3.

[7] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920[ca. 1268], <http://www.newadvent.org/summa/>, part II of part II, question 159, art. 1. I utilise here the standard scholarly referencing system for Aquinas’ Summa.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., art. 2.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London: Andrew Crooke, 1651, <http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hobbes/Leviathan.pdf>, part I, chapter VI.

[12] As cited in British Moralists 1650–1800, edited by D.D. Raphael, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991, vol. 1, 334–5.

[13] As cited in ibid., vol. 2, 72.

[14] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, part I, chapter XV.

[15] Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by Donald Frame, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998[1580], II, 27.  Given the great variety of editions of Montaigne’s essays, I do not refer to page numbers and use the standard scholarly system instead, i.e. book and essay number.

[16] Ibid., II, 11.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, translated by Thomas Nugent, New York: Cosimo, 2011[1748], book VI, chapter, 12; book XV, chapters 1, 7 & 15; book XXVI, chapter 22.

[19] Cf. Voltaire, Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Louis Moland, Paris: Garnier, 1877[1769].

[20] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edition, London: A. Millar, 1790, <http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html>, part V, chapter I, §25.

[21] Ibid., part VI, chapter III, §12.

[22] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by Edwin Cannan, Indianapolis:  The Online Library of Liberty, 1901[1776], <http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html>, book IV, chapter 8, §17.

[23] Ibid., book V, chapter 2, §§116 & 125.

[24] Ibid., book I, chapter 11, §263.

[25] Ibid., book II, chapter I, §27.

[26] Pietro Verri, Osservazioni sulla tortura, Rome: Newton, 18 (translation mine).

[27] Cesare Beccaria, Crimes and Punishments, translated by James Anson Farrer, London: Chatto & Windus: 1880[1764], 140–1.

[28] Ibid., 243.

[29] Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, Xème & IIème époque, 2004[1793–4], <http://www.eliohs.unifi.it/testi/700/condorcet/index.html> (translation mine).

[30] Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf, part II, chapter 2, §3 (translation mine).

[31] Immanuel Kant, Philosophy of Law. An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as Science of Right, translated by W. Hastie, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1887[1796], part II, section I, chapter 49, art. E.

[32] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices, Cambridge: Belknap, 1984, 237.

[33] Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali, “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico”, <http://www.leopardi.it/operette_morali.php>, (translation mine).

[34] Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, 197–8 (emphases removed).

[35] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: The Free Press, 1992.

[36] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 3, 7 & 44.

[37] Philip P. Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969, 14.

[38] Encyclopaedia of Ethics (edited by Lawrence C. Becker, New York: Garland, 1992), s.v. “Cruelty”, by Philip P. Hallie, 229–31, 229.

[39] Philip P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon, and How Goodness Happened There, New York: Harper & Row, 1985[1979], 2.

[40] Philip P. Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty, 5–6.

[41] Ibid., 13–4 & 29–31.

[42] Ibid., 22–4.

[43] Ibid., 15–20.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid., 20–2.

[46] André Dinar, Les auteurs cruels, Paris: Mercure de France, 1972[1942], 7.

[47] Philip P. Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty, 70–5.

[48] Ibid., 41 & 46.

[49] Ibid., 43.

[50] Ibid., 42 & 50.

[51] Ibid., 48.

[52] Ibid., 55–8 & 60–2.

[53] Ibid., 33.

[54] Ibid., 79–82.

[55] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by W.K. Marriott, 1908[1515], <http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm>, chapter XVII.

[56] Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002[2000], 252.

[57] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York: The Viking Press, 1977[1972], 144.

[58] Clément Rosset, Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real, translated by David F. Bell, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993[1988], 17.

[59] Ibid., 17–20.

[60] Ibid., 76.

[61] Ibid., 98 (emphases removed).

[62] Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, New York: Grove Press, 1958[1938], 101–3 & 85.

[63] Ibid., 102.

[64] Ibid., 114 (emphasis removed).

[65] Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir ou Les Instituteurs immoraux, Paris: Larousse, 1966[1795], 139 (translation mine).

[66] Ibid., 140–1 (translation mine).

[67] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997[1881], §18.

[68] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002[1886], §229.

[69] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common, 1891[1883–91], part IV, §65, section 1 (generally known and translated as Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

Enemies of Interculturalism: The Economic Crisis in Light of Xenophobia, Liberal Cruelties and Human Rights

Conference proceedings (double non-blind peer review), , ,

I was invited to present some reflections on my own intercultural experiences as an Italian philosopher who emigrated to Iceland, especially in the context of the latter’s much-televised banking collapse of 2008, without neglecting my own research on political theory. Thus, in what follows, I try to bring such seemingly disparate themes together, and discuss the notion of interculturalism, or at least some aspects relating to it within “the Nordic context” (NordForsk, “Interculturalism and Diversities: Developing intercultural models and thinking in the Nordic countries (IDIN)”, n.d.), such as:

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Michael Reid Trice, Encountering Cruelty: The Fracture of the Human Heart (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011)

Book review (editorial review), , , ,

Trice offers a phenomenology of cruelty—that charts how cruelty is lived by human subjects—which exposes cruelty as a “fracture” of the human heart. The fracture can be traced through a series of “contours” that invade and corrupt the soundness of the varying spheres of human existence—the intrapersonal, the interpersonal, and institutional life. Employing as a lodestar to his study Friedrich Nietzsche’s charge that cruelty is concealed in Western ideals and is embedded in the systems of governance that enshrine these ideals, Trice tracks the sublimations of cruelty through the “closed teleological myths” that redefine cruelty as the good. Just as tragedies have a narrative structure—beginning, middle, end—that resolves the paradoxes of the human condition and permits catharsis of the audience’s frustrations, so “for instance, the enshrined sublime Ideal, once more of Justice, can conceal a thirst for revenge” (p. 5). With the death penalty, we cruelly murder our social offenders, but our ideal permits us to redeem this murder as an act of redemption. However, though cruelty is concealed, it remains active but sublimated. Revenge is sought in the name of Justice, Trice explains. Thus our very institutions of justice act to “transvalue” (contradict) our shared communal values; it allows us to act out our instincts for blood and cruelty and channel our thirst for revenge (instincts contrary to the ideal) through institutions that conceal their true nature. Beginning, middle, end. Offense, execution, resolution. We murder to express our disdain for murder.

The brilliance of Encountering Cruelty resides in the painstaking care of Trice’s detailed charting of the effects of cruelty through the inner life of the human person and out into the world of intimate relations and human interpersonal encounter. Trice’s use of geological metaphors to trace the wound lines through the human heart help us to visualize with aching clarity the costs of the concealed cruelties of our systems and our rituals upon individuals, intimate groups, and communities within the human world. He calls upon Bible stories that exemplify cruelty—Job, Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel—to demonstrate the god’s exemplary cruelty to men, and he draws from these myths the effects of cruelty that demand reconciliation—struggle, contagion, becoming an enigma to self, excision and ressentiment. His careful analysis of the contours of cruelty in the human heart allows us a broad view across the landscape of cruelty, revealing how the objectification that enables sensitive creatures such as we to engage in cruelty against our neighbors, the neighbors whom our holy books require us to love as ourselves, annihilates interpersonal reciprocity and transvalues interpersonal well-being. A therapeutic plan for reconciling communities and healing individuals in the wake of cruelty, argues Trice, must take into account the many agonizing and destabilizing contours that cruelty has carved out across the human psyche.

Trice’s objective in exposing each of the fault-lines, carved through the landscape of the human heart, is to offer a map to guide theologians in their efforts to help the psychically wounded, victims and perpetrators, move forward from their histories of suffering and harmdoing. Trice sees the theologian as the great reconciler, called to restore people’s well-being after cruelties have destabilized their core and eroded their inner resources. His anatomy of the contours of cruelty serves as a wall-chart of the human psyche, indicating where the hurt is stored up and where the theologian must apply his healing therapies.

Many kudos to Michael Trice! This book is beautifully written, despite its dark topic, and its painstakingly careful analysis of the effects of human suffering is virtually unmatched in the history of the phenomenology of violence. It is a must read for all educated persons who wish to understand why the victims of historical sufferings continue to visit their abjection upon innocent others. Though the book is meant as a guidebook for theologians, working as practitioners of reconciliation, it is equally useful to the secular philosopher, since the timeless truths of myth continue to serve as didactic vehicles for the human drama.