From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Naphtha and Settembrini
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 03:01:06 GMT


                             Thursday, the 23rd of July, 1992

Some more responses to John Wojdylo. His are the indented bits,
unless otherwise indicated:
  
  Reader B sees science as something more than a scheme for producing
  numbers. He sees the "scientific approach" as undermining the truth he
  believes makes the fabric of all things.   (He also sees science as a moral
  philosophy.)
  
It's interesting to me that science seems to lead John Polkinghorne
to a different conclusion. He calls science, like a rational approach
to theology, ``corrigible''.

I like Polkinghorne's word ``corrigible'', but I would argue science
is in many ways the most dictatorial program we have. There's no
appeal from, no vote we can take to reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
or thirty-two feet per second per second.
  
  What do you mean by evil "on the applied side" ?

Any program of social engineering administered by force of law.
Any legislation that has as its justification an essential injustice,
such as the all-too-common-at-present ignoring by assumption of the
relevance of the old-fashioned (and religious and unscientific)
possibility of human free will.
  
I asked if Mann pokes some fun at Settembrini: 
  Yes he does. A natural question is: How can it be that Mann creates such a 
  noble and honourable character, only to poke fun at him? Could it be that
  Mann had been wavering between the two viewpoints (S + N) and wrote the novel
  to work out his own position?  (This would explain the somewhat positive
  light with which he describes Naphtha at times, and the negative
  descriptions of Settembrini -- Mann was wavering from one side to the
  other as he was writing -- but the ending leaves a clear conclusion.)

I agree completely with this idea that Mann was wavering. I'm not
convinced of the clear conclusion, however. That is, I agree that Mann
prefers Settembrini, but by the time that preference is made manifest,
Settembrini has receded in the distance.
  
                (...  Oh dear -- I am SO judgemental, aren't I.)

Hey, I'm all for judgement. It's a lot more active and human and potentially
corrigible than a tepid non-judgementalism.
  
  [Interesting and relevant extract from Kadarkay's _Georg Lukacs_, (1991)
  deleted, in which Lukacs as a prototype for Naphtha is suggested. Thank
  you, John.]
  
John warns:
  [Beware of your sensibility when reading this book]

I can have a cast-iron stomach at need.

John continues: 
  By including this quote, I'm not trying to solve the problem of whether
  or not Lukacs and Naphtha are the same person.  The quote does, however,
  support or help explain:
  
   	-  my general assessment of what Mann thought were the important ideas 
  	about Naphtha ;
   	-  why Mann often spoke of Naphtha in a glowing way (Mann was
  	also impressed by similar things about Lukacs; and he had a
  	fascination with failed intellectuals -- he was one himself (I
  	have a quote from Hermann Hesse stating something to this effect.
        I will fetch it if you want.);
  
  I have a hunch, also , that -- given Mann's fascination with failed
  intellectuals --  Naptha was spawned in Mann's mind before Settembrini.

I find the idea that Naphtha came first attractive.

John, I'm feeling pretty thick about here. I don't understand whether
you are telling me I've gotten something important wrong, or right.
You clearly outgun me in the reading you've done related to
_The Magic Mountain_. But, I'm finding myself mostly pleased
that so much of my intuition about N&S seems consonant with what you
have been saying. If N was the starting point for Mann, then S came about
because S was historically what N was reacting to. Should I be being
pleased?
  
  My interest in him and his work ?  I'm astounded at how so flawed a
  writer and intellectual could have won the Nobel Prize. (Good luck to
  him, though.)  From an artistic viewpoint, I think the novel (MM) is clumsily 
  written; from the intellectual viewpoint, I find Mann's wavering 

This leaves me wondering what you do like, John? Mann to me is
the conventional direction of development of the novel that
Joyce forsook. I like them both quite alot. But, hey, I like
everybody.
  
  Naphtha and Settembrini always appear together. I have a hunch that
  either Naphtha was conceived before Settembrini, or they were both
  conceived together, as a dialectical opposite pair.

We are agreed in this hunch.
  
I said:
  No, I think it's an evil program. But I also think that to say this I
  have to carry about with me some powerful notion of what evil is,
  and that no glorious moment of human achievement, no Napoleon
  at Austerlitz, no Michelangelo painting the ceiling, is worth
  this evil. 
  
John responded: 
  Is it worth laying waste a country in the name of your good?
  
  If not, then perhaps your notion of evil (and therefore, good) is not as
  strong as you think.

A passionate intensity the important thing? That's an aesthetic
standard, not ethical.

I said:
  Naphtha ultimately dismisses reason---he reasons that it's too logocentric.
  
And John:
  No he doesn't.  He's always "in communion"  with two opposites, and he varies
  between the two  One of them happens to deny reason.  He doesn't ever
  consciously dismiss reason: he just thinks that he's being reasonable.

I'm willing to go away and think about it.

  I don't think that the current situation with respect to legislation and
  law is all that bad in the *general* sense. i.e. there's a huge problem
  with aborigines in the system in Australia,  but that's not going to be
  solved by throwing the system out the window and introducing a Marxist 
  (god-help-us) or whatever system.   

I'm not advocating more system, but less.

Look, John, some of your old postings with ``fuck'' or ``cunt''
every other word could get you arrested in this country right now.
At the moment, there are two ultra-feminist reporters at the local paper
who are crusading about U. of Waterloo's distribution of newsgroups
like alt.sex and alt.sex.bondage on UW computers. They complain
especially about ``offensive'' material and how pornography is
equivalent to ``violence against women''. So, with this Trouble
in River City kick going on, and the local Crown Attorneys furnishing
politically correct quotes, I'd bet you could get arrested real fast
making one of those old posts, especially if it were aimed at a female
target.

True, there's a Charter of Rights and Freedoms here, but I prefer to
call it a Charter of Fond Wishes and Desires if Society Were Only
Perfect. That's because the Supreme Court can, and routinely does,
let the government get away with unjust legislation if they find
there's a ``compelling interest''. Given that they knowingly trashed the
principle of presumption of innocence in favor of a law presuming
any man guilty of pimping who lives with, or is habitually in the company of
prostitutes---that is, they unanimously agreed this law was a violation of
the Charter and then overrode the Charter anyway because of the particular
evil of prostitution---, I don't believe the Charter protects Canadians
from much of anything.

If you were arrested for distributing ``obscene'' material under
this law, I would say that that arrest would constitute a crime.
  
I proposed that we choose our own offense. John countered: 
  Your proposition is questionable.  First:  They may very well be programmed
  by society to feel like shit when they see it;  or they may be desensitized
  by overexposure to films like "Silence of the Lambs".   In neither case
  is a choice willed.
  
John, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Everybody believes it
and I don't know why. We are convinced that society does this programming,
that ``Silence of the Lambs'' ``desensitizes'' us, that the publication
of _American Psycho_ is likely to cause 13.67 new instances of violence
against women per week that it's on the best-seller lists, that reading
bowdlerized Grimm to children will keep them from growing up to
be violence-loving psychopaths. There are studies, aren't there?
Haven't scientists written down some sort of sociological or psychological
field equations?

I claim that these buffet forces that we take so much for granted
are an *assumption*. They are an assumption made by certain academic
practitioners of the so-called ``human sciences'' so that they
can pretend they do science just like the big boys. Now, I'm all
for making heuristic assumptions per se, I think corrigibility
a good quality. But when correlations (``I interviewed three people
and 2 of them agreed that pornography causes violence against
women'') start getting interpreted
in terms of hard (I mean legislative) statements about causality,
I draw the line. There has never been an experiment or study to
discount the possibility of human free will. There has never been
any success comparable to the 10-decimal-place predictive accuracy that
allows physicists to ignore old-fashioned notions like Divine Providence.
It's simply bad moral philosophy.
 
I said of Naphtha's death:
  Sad for Settembrini, too, I should think.
  
John said:
  He is not bound to feel remorse.  You may feel sad if he doesn't, but so
  what? 

Well, my point is that I think he did feel sad, that he interpreted
Naphtha's death, the whole duel, as a personal failure.
  
Earlier, John had written:
   Reader A: "He wished a position of influence so that he could realize
   his vision of moral anarchy and desolation, for a transition to his
   anti-intellectual new world that'd enslaved us all.  Good riddance. May
   he burn in hell."

I responded:
  Reader M:
  There is indeed more than one path to slavery. ``May he burn in hell''
  betrays you.
  
And John said:
  Tsk. Tsk. Reader A said it, not I.

I should have written: ``May he burn in hell'' betrays you, Reader A.
That's what I meant, that A isn't as free of the totalitarian impulse
(which B so openly displays) as A thinks he is.
  
  Given that a man whose views can create untold destruction has shot himself,
  why should Reader A feel remorse ?

Again, I wonder at these views that ``can create untold destruction''. 
I've met up with a lot of views in my day, but I've never met up with
any as potent as this.

I'm afraid this sequence leaves me completely in the dark:
  Incidentally, you are Left enough to have whistled (or at least hummed)
  the tune to which the following line is sung in one of the verses:
  
  	"May the furrows of our fields
  	be filled with the blood of our enemies..."
  
  Guess which popular tune they're sung to.

I'd like to know. And what you mean by this.
  
John asks me:
  Do you really have a strong notion of good and evil?  

Well, I said I *think* I do.
  
  Why do you give evil a second chance?  Why do you condemn your children
  to facing this evil, just because you didn't have the guts to overcome
  your pity?  Your pity makes you, ultimately, evil's accomplice.

Nonsense. If Naphtha tried to kill my children I'd simply react
by slicing him up in little bits. If he tried to kill yours,
I think that the right thing for me to do would be to gun him down (I'm
dodging any consideration of whether I'd have the *gumption* to do
this). But the guy was just talking.  Or thinking, writing, making films.
He didn't *do* anything, except kill *himself*. Not Settembrini or Castorp.
  
About Castorp:
  Reader John:  He doesn't choose; he's transfixed with his own indecision;
  fights like some schizophrenic, first believing one thing, then another.

Yes. Except that I would call this indecision a choice, yes.
  
                    Mike Morris
              (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
 
Xref: sparky rec.arts.books:12873 rec.arts.sf.misc:2153 rec.humor:24303 alt.folklore.urban:19540 alt.religion.kibology:3162