Philo-Aesthetic Digest 1/06/2025
An odour of eccentricity
Hi! Welcome back to another year here at Gnocchic Codices. I hope to get back to our usual Friday update schedule soon, but it might take a while. Next time there should be some fun discussion of Allan Bloom and Matthew Arnold, but for now here’s some more bible talk, a reading list, and a capsule review of a William Faulkner novel!
Tuesday night at the Bible study: the Books of Joshua and Judges
This week I read the books of Joshua & Judges in the English Standard Version. Transitional books bridging the gap between the Mosaic narrative of the pentateuch and the chronicles of the rise and fall of the kingdom of David and Solomon that make up much of the rest of the Hebrew bible, these are brutal, eventful if quite episodic narratives. Judges in particular is one of the easiest parts of the Hebrew bible to subject to historical criticism because you can almost perceive even in translation where the composers connected various stories into an overarching whole. The feeling is very similar to the parts of the Iliad that feel clearly dropped in from an earlier legend.
And the angel of the LORD appeared to the woman and said to her, "Behold, you are barren and have not borne children, but you shall conceive and bear a son. Therefore be careful and drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines."
Something I've often found myself thinking about in recent years is the degree to which my childhood fell during the heyday of the New Atheists following the events of September 11th 2001. If you didn't live through that time it's a little hard to overstate how hostile left of center culture-and I just mean ambient culture, not necessarily even the highbrows-got to religious belief for a while. Even if one never really subscribed to the rather reductively materialist position that was espoused by Dawkins, Harris et al, it was almost impossible not to be somewhat influenced by their style and method of argument. I bring all of this up because these books with their divinely-sanctioned genocide and settlement of Canaan were favorite texts of the New Atheists in those days. “See, this is all that religion ever has been or will be, brutal slaughter that no rational person could condone in the twenty-first century.1”
As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people shouted a great shout, and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they captured the city. Then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.
I’ve had all of this in mind in part because I’ve been reading a book from 2000 called The Fourth Great Awakening & the future of Egalitarianism. I would be lying if I told you that I agreed with the thesis of the book, namely that the titular phenomenon (identified as having taken place from 1960 to the moment of publication) was associated with a greater egalitarianism in American life-it seems to me that the agenda of the fourth great awakening was primarily inegalitarian and motivated by a desire to tamp down and reverse social changes associated with the upheavals of the late 1950s-70s. I may write more about this at a later date, depending on how interested/convinced I am.
Some Books I’d like to remember to read:
The Apocalypse-D. H. Lawrence, purchased because Paul Franz wrote a fantastic exegesis of it the other day (you were right by the way, it was the Penguin edition.)
The Notion of Authority-Alexandre Kojève, discovered by chance in my usual used bookstore, curious to investigate this and also the writings of his on Kant Verso is putting out in June.
The Limits of Analysis-Stanley Rosen, similarly discovered while searching to see if the copy of Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism I had foolishly left for another time was still there (it was not.) Rosen fascinates me, and I’m still trying to figure him out. He comes off as both possibly the most arrogant of Strauss’s students and seemingly the only one who really properly escaped from his shadow and was a more or less normal academic philosopher.2
Amusingly two separate books by famous intellectuals of the right are sitting in wait for me to finish The Red and the Black, so that’s on the agenda at some point, although I have a possible review assignment that is taking priority at the moment. It should be a big year!
Capsule Review: Faulkner’s Sanctuary
I recently read William Faulkner's infamous 1931 "commercial novel" Sanctuary, finding it entertaining and striking but also perhaps more than anything else I've read by Faulkner, deeply unpleasant. When I was younger I had very little use for thid kind of literature, which seems to have no purpose or message beyond "this life is a cruel one." It seems the most nihilistic and the least redemptive of his works, brimming with the loathing of nomal, "good" people, people who turn out mothers and children onto the street for living in sin or to protect their reputations, and who burn innocent men alive.3 You can see why the French loved Faulkner, or what Toni Morrison took from him which she didn't like to acknowledge in that way that great writers sometimes disavow their obvious influences for one reason or another.4
The District Attorney turned away. "Your Honor and gentlemen, you have listened to this horrible, this unbelievable, story which this young girl has told; you have seen the evidence and heard the doctor's testimony: I shall no longer subject this ruined, defenseless child to the agony of_" he ceased; the heads turned as one and watched a man come stalking up the aisle toward the Bench. He walked steadily, paced and followed by a slow gaping of the small white faces, a slow hissing of collars. He had neat white hair and a clipped mous-tache like a bar of hammered silver against his dark skin. His eyes were pouched a little. A small paunch was buttoned snugly into his immaculate linen suit. He carried a panama hat in one hand and a slender black stick in the other. He walked steadily up the aisle in a slow expulsion of silence like a prolonged sigh, looking to neither side.
To be honest, Temple Drake as a character reminded me quite a bit of that infamous (at least among those of us who know it exists) passage in Birth of a Nation’hood where Morrison argues that it does matter what a woman is wearing, and her argument there and elsewhere that women invite what is done to them, are complicit in their own exploitation.
The criticisms of Sanctuary that one reads are nonetheless also true. The first hundred pages of the book are masterful, an ambiance of dread and onrushing doom building to the monstrous Popeye’s murder of Tommy and rape of Temple. Faulkner is close to the peak of his narratorial game, and at times one hardly believes that this was allegedly written as a sellout. The next two hundred or so make it all too believable, providing the enthusiast of Yoknapatawpha County with a rich if largely execrable portrait and a detective story that’s no great shakes even if it is suspenseful at points.
That this worldview had a certain naiveté about what the majority of human history consisted of seemed obvious to me even at the time, and I was really quite young when all of these debates were happening in the second Bush administration. Knowledge of history breeds nihilism unless one has some transcendent ideal with which to hold or some vision of a proper telos, an awakening from the long nightmare.
There's a famous Strauss quote about his students having the ‘odour of conservatism” about them. It might also be said that many of them tended to have something of an odour of eccentricity relative to the mainstream of contemporary political science, classicism, and continental philosophy.
One of the only times I have ever been ahead of a cultural curve (although it’s one I don’t feel great about being early to) was feeling as a teenager encountering great 20th century literature for the first time that this sort of attitude was really somewhat overdone, that it had itself become hegemonic and somewhat oppressive. In retrospect I’m divided between noting that there was something to that thought and recognizing that I felt that way because I was choosing not see things about myself by rather hysterically on being “normal.”
It would be interesting to see if there’s been more discussion of Faulkner’s influence on Morrison since her death in 2019, given that she had if not exactly an anxiety of influence in the sense meant by Bloom (Harold) at least an anxiety of the perception of influence about his work in relation to her own.
Fascinating series. These names were very much in the air when I studied with the Straussians as an undergraduate. I haven't heard them much since graduating (and going down a very different route, obviously) but, like Alan Horn's late Victorian occultists, it's an extremely interesting intellectual network.
The New Atheism vibe you describe is right on--I was in college in the early Aughts and that was everywhere.