Freund Humanus

March 22, 2025

A Poem for Truly, Truly Dark Times

It’s true, we live in very dark times. In the USA, a fascist, authoritarian government is doing its best to destroy the principles and practices upon which its democracy was built. In India, Narendra Modi is still in power. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán remains in power, the far right is strong in Italy and France. Then there is the AfD in Germany. I could go on and on.

Dark times come and go, and those of us caught in the moment might wonder what posterity will think of our attempts at resistance, our struggles with personal and collective responses to abuses of power and human rights abuses. People caught in previous dark times have asked themselves the same question.

In the 1930’s the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht was living in Berlin. He had already written what is probably his best-known play, The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), together with Kurt Weil, who wrote the score.

But times were changing. The Nazis were interrupting performances and harassing performers.

In early 1933, police stormed a performance of The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme), a play about communism, collective action, and the principles a person would be willing to die for. The organizers were charged with high treason.

In February that year, the buildings of pariament, the Reichstag, were set alight, a state of emergency was declared, and the way was cleared for the Nazis, who were growing more powerful by the day, and who began openly enlisting the police and armed right-wing paramilitary forces to persecute their opponents.

The following day, Brecht fled Berlin with his family. His path of exile would eventually see him settle in the USA, but initially he lived in Denmark, where he remained until 1939. Meanwhile, he was black-listed, his books were burned, and his German citizenship was revoked.

In 1939, he was living in Svendborg on the Danish island of Funen, in the house you see here. And it was here that, in the same year, he published the collection Svendborg Poems (Svendborger Gedichte).

One of my favourite poems from this collection is also one of Brecht’s best known poems: An die Nachgeborenen. Nachgeboren means “born afterwards”. Brecht is 41 years old, and probably feels the temporal disorientation that comes with middle age. What have I done with my life? How do I fit in the relentless motion of time, of history, as it snatches private lives and starts burying them in the past? Is there hope for the future, for future generations? And how will they look upon this moment in history, and upon my life within this moment? Brecht’s son Stefan was 14, and his daughter Barbara was eight years old when he wrote this poem. How might his children and grandchildren look back on those who lived in dark times?

But more than that, Brecht speaks to us, to you, you who have survived these times. For to imagine a future where the troubles of today have been put to rest, and a time when there will be voices to hear what once was – this is the great hope in dark times.

When a poem moves me, I want to translate it. Of course, we already have excellent translations of An die Nachgeborenen. And excellent commentaries. I like Scott Horton’s 2008 version, published in Harper’s magazine. And I was thrilled to see that, as Trump took presidential office for the first time in 2017, Jesse L. Kopp, moved by sentiments similar to my own, read Brecht’s musings on dark times and translated the poem.

There are probably more examples I’ve missed; my aim here was not to be exhaustive, but to share with you my own reading of Brecht. I won’t reproduce the German, it’s there on the pages I’ve linked above. Here is my reading of Brecht for our own dark, dark times:

A Poem to Those Yet to be Born

It’s true, I live in very dark times!
An innocent word is foolish. An untroubled face
Is a sign of insensitivity. Those who laugh
Have not yet heard
The terrible news.

What are these times,
When talking of trees is almost a crime
Since it means saying nothing of all these terrible deeds!
That person crossing the street,
He’s just not there for his friends
Who struggle in need?

It’s true, I only just manage to earn my keep.
But believe me, that’s just by chance. There’s nothing
I do that justifies a full stomach.
It’s just by chance that I’m spared. (If my luck runs out, I’m lost).

They tell me, eat and drink! Be glad for what you have!
But how can I eat and drink when I’m tearing my food from the hungry, and
My glass of water from those dying of thirst?

I’d like to be wise.
It’s written in the ancient books what wisdom is:
Withdraw from worldly disputes and spend your brief time
Without fear
And make your way without violence
Meeting evil with good
And not pursuing your desires but forgetting them;
That counts as wise.
Those are things I cannot do.
It’s true, I live in very dark times!

I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger reigned.
I joined the people in a time of rebellion
And I shared their outrage.
And that’s how the time passed by
That was given me here on earth.

I ate my food between the battles
I lay down to sleep among the murderers
I took care of love carelessly
And nature I regarded without patience.
And that’s how the time passed by
That was given me here on earth.

The roads led into quagmires in my time.
Language betrayed me to the slaughterer.
Little could I do. But without me the rulers
Would have felt a little safer. That’s what I hoped.
And that’s how the time passed by
That was given me here on earth.

My powers were meagre. The goal
Lay very far away
It was clear to see, even if it was
Hardly attainable for me.
And that’s how the time passed by
That was given me here on earth.

III

You who shall rise up from the flood
In which we went under
When you speak of our weakness
Pay heed
To the dark times
You managed to flee.

We may have passed through the war of the classes,
Changing our country more often than our shoes, despairing
When there was only injustice and no outrage.

Yet this we know:
Hatred of what is contemptible also
Distorts the face.
Anger over injustice
Leaves the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to pave the way for kindness
We ourselves could not be kind.

But you, when the time has come
For people to be helpers to people
May your thoughts of us
Treat us gently.

Leave a comment

February 5, 2025

Teaching the Herero Genocide in the Age of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

This semester I’m teaching a novel I’ve taught many times before, but this time it feels different. Peter Moor’s Journey to Southwest Africa is a simple adventure story set against the backdrop of what has been described as the first genocide of the 20th century: the planned starvation, forced discplacement, and mass murder of the Ovaherero of present-day Namibia. When Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s development aid minister, attended a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the Herero uprising in Namibia in 2004, she stated (sepaking in English): “The atrocities committed at that time would have been termed genocide.”

The same ideology that led to the mass murder of the Ovaherero continues today in the genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people by Israel in Gaza. And the ideology of genocide would, a few decades after the German murder of the Ovaherero, lead to the German murder of the European Jews, at times with the same ideologues and the same political actors. In response to the Shoah, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Israel, which was a driving force in the establisment of the convention, signed the following year. Incidentally, as Dominik J. Schaller has noted, Raphael Lemkin, the international lawyer who coined the term genocide in 1944, regarded the German policy against the African inhabitants of Namibia as an unambiguous case of genocide. Unambiguous, and yet, it seems so difficult to acknowledge genocide when it is happening right before one’s eyes. Witness Frenssen’s novel, written just two years after the genocide had claimed the lives of at least 80% of the Ovaherero nation.

Peter Moor, who hails from a small town in Northern Germany, sets sail for the German colony to take part in the war against the Ovaherero. He suffers privation: hunger, thirst, sickness; he drives the struggling Herero nation to their last stance at Namibia’s Waterberg, and he joins in forcing the desparate people into the Omaheke desert, where they will perish of thirst and hunger. Here he fights alongside General Lothar von Trotha, who issued his infamous proclamation October 1904:

I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Hereros. The Hereros are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen, cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer. I announce to the people that whoever hands me one of the chiefs shall receive 1,000 marks, and 5,000 marks for Samuel Maherero. The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the ‘long tube’ (cannon). Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away and fire on them. Such are my words to the Herero people.

When Gustav Frenssen published Peter Moor’s Journey to Southwest Africa in 1906, he was already an established writer. He wrote in the genre of Heimatliteratur, which was broadly concerned with asserting what was considered to be traditional values in the face of massive social upheaval in Germany in the second half of the 19th century: rural poverty, mass emigration, rapid urbanization, various financial crises, and the like. In this respect you could look at it as the aesthetic branch of the MAGA movement in Germany at the time. Make Germany Great Again.

Frenssen died in April 1945, just weeks before Hitler committed suicide. Ever since Hitler had come to power in 1933, Frenssen had openly supported the National Socialists. In 1936 he founded the Eutiner Dichterkreis, a group of writers openly supporting Nazi ideals, and in 1938, Hitler awarded him the Goethe Prize for Art and Science. On every front, as the age of German colonialism morphed into German fascism, Frenssen saw himself validated in his artistic quest to Make Germany Great Again.

Part of making Germany great again was the acquisition of colonies. All the other major European powers were deeply invested in land theft and forced, unfree black labour, so why not the Germans too?

When Bismarck called the so-called Congo-Conference in 1884 to ensure European consensus on the land theft, Germany was left with a large, arid colony they called German Southwest Africa.

On the ground, the minting of the new colony meant little more than a continuation of existing policies: the disinheritance of the local population was ensured by a combination of shady contractual deals, coersion, and violence. In 1904, the Ovaherero had had enough, and they began an armed insurrection. The German response was swift and brutal, and just like Israel’s response to the Hamas murders of Israeli citizens, it took the resistance to colonization as grounds for genocide.

Frenssen never set foot in the African colony. He collected letters, postcards, memoirs; he interviewed soldiers, and studied the war reports of the Colonial Office. In a telling conversation in the novel, one that comes as a surprise to the reader, one of the old soldiers points out that the Herero insurrection is a struggle for liberation, just like the liberation struggle the Germans had fought against the French. He asks: “Children, how should it be otherwise? They were ranchmen and proprietors, and we were there to make them landless workingmen; and they rose up in revolt. They acted in just the same way that North Germany did in 1813. This is their struggle for independence.”

I say this is a surprise, because so far, the novel has done its best, in subtle and not so subtle ways, to equate black Africans with animals, robbing them of any human qualities that would legitimate resistance to colonization. And yet, what is being raised here is something that has to be said in the novel, since the ideology of colonization raises serious contradictions within the dominant disscourses of the day. Given the fact that resistance to forced colonization is legitimate, and given the fact that Christianity requires love and respect for one’s fellow humans, isn’t this war wrong in every respect? The soldier continues: “Either it is right to colonize, that is, to deprive others of their rights, to rob and to make slaves, or it is just and right to Christianize, that is, to proclaim and live up to brotherly love. One must clearly desire the one and despise the other; one must wish to rule or to love, to be for or against Jesus. The missionaries used to preach to them, ‘Ye are our brothers,’ and that turned their heads.”

The response comes swiftly, wiping these arguments off the table with a social Darwinist declaration: “They are not our brothers, but our slaves, whom we must treat humanely but strictly. These ought to be our brothers? They may become that after a century or two. They must first learn what we ourselves have discovered, — to stem water and to make wells, to dig and to plant corn, to build houses and to weave clothing. After that they may well become our brothers.” Toward the end of the novel, we see how such social Darwinism will lead not to humane strictness, but to murder. When a Herero man is captured, one of the German soldiers declares: “ The missionary said to me, ‘Beloved, don’t forget that the blacks are our brothers.’ Now I will give my brother his reward.” The soldier pushes the Herero man off and says: “Run away!” He is then shot in the back as he runs. In the conversation that ensues, the same argument for murdering the supposedly less-civilized Ovaherero is made: “These blacks have deserved death before God and man, not because they have murdered two hundred farmers and have revolted against us, but because they have built no houses and dug no wells.”

The first step in genocide is always discursive, and it always involves a dehumanization of the victims. When I read Peter Moor today, I am struck by the way a dehumanizing ideology of civilization and progress, coupled with theological arguments, continues to legitimate genocide in Gaza 120 years after the genocide in German Southwest Africa. Two days after the Hamas attack on Israeli citizens, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and will act accordingly.” This builds on some of the founding ideas legitimizing the Jewish settlement of Palestine, including the idea that god had promised the land to Israel.

I can’t resist pointing out that Frenssen’s novel ends with one of the most amusing examples of narrative incompetence I have come across. The closing paragraph reads: “When I was sauntering along the Jungfernstieg [in Hamburg] in my worn-out, dirty cord uniform, with dark, sunburned face, a middle-aged man came up and joined me, and asked me all sorts of questions as we went along. In the course of the conversation it came out that I had heard of him in my father’s house; for he had known my father from childhood. I related to him all that I had seen and experienced, and what I had thought of it all. And he has made this book out of it.”

As the German philosopher and essayist Leo Berg wrote in a review of Frenssen’s novel in 1907: “That really is a joke … Either the book is the soldier’s report, and he cannot say this, or else Frenssen turned the report into the book, and then it’s something the soldier really cannot know.”

The impossibility of this narrative position mirrors the impossibility of the novel’s claims to truth, just as the discourses legitimating genocide are riddled with lies and contradictions. Unfortunately, the reader isn’t confronted with this narrative ruse until the novel it over, but by now, the witness of history should be able to see genocide coming long before it happens.

Leave a comment

January 21, 2025

Goethe’s poem Auf dem See

In the summer of 1775, the young (and already famous) poet, Johann Wolfgang Goethe found himself in a boat on Lake Zurich with a few friends, including Christian and Friedrich Stolberg, two noblemen who had accompanied him from his parents home in Frankfurt. Already famous… or better said, infamous, following the publication of his novel Sorrows of Young Werther the previous year. The theological faculty at Leipzig University had condemned its heathen views on suicide, and it was banned in some places.

On Lake Zurich he took out his notebook and, as his biographer Nicholas Boyle describes, he “scribbled a poem which caught his mood as it shifted on that glorious summer morning and which has claims to be regarded as one of his finest works.” It was an odd set of images that entered his head when he began with the words Ich saug’ an meiner Nabelschnur / Nun Nahrung aus der Welt. Sucking sustenance from the world through his umbilical cord… one hardly knows were to begin (and I think I mean that in a positive way). The poet seems to have felt similar reservations when he revised it more than a decade later. And yet, this wealth of associations clings to the poem in its revised version, the version that is usualy read:

Auf dem See

Und frische Nahrung, neues Blut
Saug’ ich aus freier Welt;
Wie ist Natur so hold und gut,
Die mich am Busen hält!
Die Welle wieget unsern Kahn
Im Rudertakt hinauf,
Und Berge, wolkig himmelan,
Begegnen unserm Lauf.

Aug’, mein Aug’, was sinkst du nieder?
Goldne Träume, kommt ihr wieder?
Weg, du Traum! so Gold du bist;
Hier auch Lieb’ und Leben ist.

Auf der Welle blinken
Tausend schwebende Sterne,
Weiche Nebel trinken
Rings die thürmende Ferne;
Morgenwind umflügelt
Die beschattete Bucht,
Und im See bespiegelt
Sich die reifende Frucht.

In March 1817, Franz Schubert put these words to music. He was 25 at the time, the same age the poet had been when he rowed on Lake Zurich. This is one of more than 60 of Goethe’s poems that inspired Schubert. Apparently, he tried hard to win the older poet’s aproval, though it seems Goethe’s ear, attuned as it was to Mozart, found Schubert’s innovative music too strange. The Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock also wrote a choral version in 1908, which I find captures the shifting moods of the poem better.

I couldn’t find any English version of this poem I found satisfactory, so I wrote my own, which I hope you enjoy:

On the Lake

And sustenance fresh, and blood that’s new,
I suck from the world around.
What grace and goodness nature grew
That on her breast I found!
Gentle waves bouy up our boat
In rhythm with the oars,
And mountains, clouded, skyward float,
And stand to face our course.

Why gaze downward, eye, my eye?
Golden dreams, you’re once more nigh?
Gold you are, you dreams, but flee!
Love and life are here with me.

On the water blinking
Floating stars abound,
Gentle mists are drinking
The towering distance all round;
Morning breeze directing
Its flight round shaded bay,
And ripening fruit reflecting
Itself upon the lake

Leave a comment

April 27, 2024

Plagiarism and Democracy

Denis Diderot (1713-84), co-founder of the Encyclopédie project

In the age of Enlightenment, European intellectuals had a dream which they termed encyclopaedic. It was to systematize worldly knowledge and present it in a form that was accessible to all educated citizens. For the first time in centuries, knowledge was to enter the public domain, where it would work communally for the advancement of humanity. If the encyclopaedists had been able to glance into the future, it is hard to say whether the Internet would have looked to them like a dream come true, or a grotesque perversion of their ideals. Here is a medium that allows the project of universal knowledge to be realized in ways scarcely conceivable to a group of scholars labouring for years to produce a meagre 20, 30, 40 volumes of printed text. And yet, the very accessibility of this medium starts to become a problem. Who exactly qualifies for taking part in this grand scheme of collecting and systematizing knowledge? What even is knowledge? What does it mean for knowledge to be freely distributed in public?

The intellectuals of the Enlightenment were certain that the expansion of the public sphere was a good thing, but they weren’t certain who should take part in it. Do women and the uneducated have the same access to knowledge as well-to-do men? Is knowledge advancing and perfecting its methods and outcomes, boldly led by European intellectuals, whose relationship to indigenous knowledge systems is yet to be specified? At the time, the answers to questions like these were far from clear. And today we seem to be equally uncertain what to do about the distribution and control of knowledge.

The controversy on the use and misuse of plagiarism-detecting software indicates that the concern of Enlightenment scholars regarding the systematization, control and restriction of knowledge is also our own concern. Today, perhaps for the first time, the encyclopaedist dream of truly universal knowledge is close, but only close. For the Internet shows dramatically that as information becomes increasingly universal and increasingly available, it becomes less and less like knowledge. Or would anyone claim that, collectively, the pages and pages of online text qualify as knowledge? There is probably consensus that the unprecedented expansion of information in the age of the Internet is a good thing, even if a spectacular proportion of this is garbage. Garbage is garbage, but as long as the storage capacity is there and the search software is good enough, who cares?

Added to this is the problem that the nature and value of information itself is increasingly uncertain. In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote an essay Der Erzähler (The Storyteller), in which he put forward the proposition that the art of story-telling, inextricably bound as it was to the physical presence of the teller, had been suffering a gradual demise, spurred on by the rise of information. At that time, information for him meant the rise of the press, newspapers, the primary instrument of the bourgeoisie in high capitalism, as he put it. What is worth considering is the way information lays claim to validity, not through the authority of its speaker (as story-telling had done), but through its plausibility, the fact that it is “understandable in and for itself.” Everything that happened in his day seemed to happen to the benefit of information, not authoritative narration. Where knowledge as it had been understood for a long time was intimately connected to a certain kind of narrative authority (and this also applies to the natural sciences), information rests upon its novelty, which condemns it to its own obsolescence, almost as soon as it has staked its claim. Benjamin was perceptive enough to see the alliance of information technology (for that’s the correct term to use when describing the press), and capitalism, and it is this alliance that makes his comments relevant still today, even if for us information technology has taken on a whole range of new forms. And these forms have disseminated throughout institutions of learning, as becomes evident, for example, in the question of plagiarism and the university.

As frustrated professors and misunderstood students confront each other across essay pages of dubious origin, we are forced to ask what it is that the university intends to do with the expansion of information and its easy accessibility. And here we should be careful not to be led astray by the rise of so-called artificial intelligence. Thirty seconds interacting with automated voice responses on the phone should tell us that we are on the ground of information, not intelligence.

It should not surprise us that the university has emerged as the place where plagiarism is a crucial unsolved problem. In its medieval prototype, this institution was traditionally responsible for ensuring that the most intelligent young minds of the time did not cross the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, and that their ideas remained within a closed and carefully regulated community of scholars.

In the age of the Internet, however, it seems impossible to entrust the regulation of worldly knowledge to a community of scholars, nor would most people today even think that this is desirable. And it is not only the Internet that casts doubt on the ability of this community to police knowledge. Knowledge today is fought over by two remarkable and unprecedented collectives. One the one hand an amorphous collection of counter-publics negotiating unruly technological media for the endless replication and distribution of texts, images, sounds; on the other hand the corporations that fund research and patent their findings.

And somewhere in between, there are the universities. What role are universities to play in this struggle? Even if no-one wants to see universities as ivory towers restricting access to knowledge, there seems to be a widespread awareness of the damage unchecked distribution of information is causing on a micro and macro level in the world today.The plagiarism debate in the university is forcing us to rethink the boundaries between information, which is freely and readily available, and knowledge, which must be acquired. Knowledge is power, and for this reason, the solutions we seek to the plagiarism problem will cut to the core of our ideas about how power is to be acquired and used. The plagiarism debate is about power and the access to knowledge. It is about information, corporations, institutions, and democracy.

The Internet makes it increasingly and painfully apparent that the free accessibility of information is in essence profoundly opposed to the idea of the university. For the university, traditionally, has been entrusted not with the unlimited dissemination of information, but with the guardianship of knowledge. And this is not a bad thing, for it is in the limitations placed on knowledge that we define it as knowledge – as the body of ideas and practices that are central to stability and change in society. And this knowledge can only be accessed after learning a particular specialist language, a set of intellectual skills – and above all a moral code and a sensitivity to society’s history and diversity. The task of the university is to produce and distribute knowledge, and to reflect critically on the use of knowledge. This is why every university worthy of the name places the humanities at its core.

And in the matter of plagiarism, the universities are failing. I believe we are failing because we are asking the wrong questions. We should not be asking how to identify and put an end to Internet cut-and-paste essay writing, or to the use of ChatGPT or mindy to do research. Instead, we need to ask what exactly we require students to do when we assign academic exercises, and what we are trying to do when we evaluate these exercises. If the task assigned can be completed more easily, quickly and accurately by Internet “plagiarism”, then the student has done the right thing by “plagiarizing”. The problem is not that students are plagiarizing, it is that professors are assigning the wrong kinds of projects. In the age of the Internet, if the project consists of quickly gathering and assembling information, then “plagiarism” is the only activity that makes sense. To live in the age of information is to live in the age of plagiarism, whether we are talking about the endless circulation and repetition of media-bites, sampling in music, or re-tweeting. The issue is the same – who owns information? But this is a different question from the question: what is knowledge? And it is this latter question that is proper to the university.

Clearly, the skills of cut-and-paste or using ChatGPT are not the primary skills we want to teach in university. Every school child knows how to use them. The Internet is creating a new class society, and one of its many and complex dividing lines separates the cut-and-paste act of plagiarism from the formulation of ideas. The information-age proletariat is one who is skilled at quick and effective cut-and-paste. But if the university is to remain a valid institution in the information age, it will have to find a mechanism for distinguishing this activity from true knowledge, from the development and expression of ideas. And if it is to remain a central institution in a modern democracy, it will have to ensure that the production and distribution of knowledge remains in the public domain. This means fair and free access to university education, and it means a fair distribution of the results of university research. For a democracy must promise its citizens equality not only before the law, but equality in the access to knowledge and power.

This brings us to turnitin.com. As a member of one of the many universities that pays for the services of iParadigms, based in Oakland, California, I need to register my strong reservations. The issue is not simply that the use of plagiarism detection software fosters distrust. Nor is it solely a question of intellectual property. It is a matter of the privatization of knowledge. Why do we in the universities need to pay a private company to do the gatekeeping of knowledge, simply because we have not yet learned how to negotiate the boundaries between information and knowledge? And the matter is more serious and more pressing still. Why do we pay a company for a “service” that puts it in a position of potentially unprecedented power – as the collecting place and storage house for the ideas of the world’s brightest young minds? This knowledge is not in the public domain. Students taking turnitin-sponsored courses must agree “that by taking this course all required papers may be subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com for the detection of plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers. The terms that apply to the University’s use of the Turnitin.com service are described on the Turnitin.com web site.” (I cut and pasted this from the Turnitin website; am I guilty of plagiarism?).

We live in a time when the principles of democracy are under siege. One aspect of this is the increasing concentration of knowledge and power in just a few hands, where it is carefully guarded by corporate structures, and available only to the wealthy. At the same time, the knowledge-power-wealth elite puts huge amounts of time and money into the management of information. Once we look at it from this perspective, the plagiarism debate in universities is at the heart of the struggle for democracy. We professors need to decide whether we are going to face the challenges posed by the ready availability of information in the age of the internet; or whether we will simply be another uncritical channel in the widespread privatization of knowledge and power.

Leave a comment

March 18, 2023

Premesh Lalu on Freedom, Aesthetic Education, and Race

Premesh Lalu was for many years director of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. When I was asked to speak on a panel discussing his latest book, Undoing Apartheid, I was thrilled. I’d already seen the manuscript and was inspired by his novel approach to conceptualizing apartheid and its aftermath. The published version (Polity Press) is an important book, beautifully written, challenging and rewarding. These were my thoughts after a more careful reading of his book:

The title, Undoing Apartheid, only tells half the story. It’s a book about the never-ending end of apartheid, what might be called apartheid’s endlessness. But its also a book about unresolved problems in the contemporary world, however you want to label it, the world of global race-based inequality, of north-south divide, of neo-liberalism. Reading this book, I soon realized, it’s not just about undoing apartheid, it’s about aesthetic and philosophical interventions in a world where race-based slavery continues under a different name. Lalu’s book addresses problems concerning the conception of race, the understanding of freedom, the becoming-technical of the human if I can use one of his phrases, and the place of the aesthetic in education and in understanding history.

In my presentation, I spoke about the book along both these registers.

So, to start with, reading the book as an intervention in debates on South Africa after apartheid. The final chapter of Lalu’s book begins with the question, what might have ensued if, on that sunny day in 1990, when Nelson Mandela stepped out of prison, he had encountered what protesting students had accidentally discovered in 1985 when police hidden in the back of a truck opened fire on them? The incident Lalu is refering to became known as the Trojan Horse massacre.In Lalu’s words, “on 15 October 1985, a South Africaaaaa Railways vehicle with gun-wielding soldiers hidden in metal crates brought a macabre scene of death and espair to the streets of Athlone” (p. 163). Athlone is a suburb of Cape Town that was designated “coloured” under apartheid’s Group Areas Act.. Jonathan Claasen, aged 21, lost his life, so did Shaun Magmoed, aged 15, and Michael Miranda, aged 11.

What had the protesting students accidentally discovered, apart from the bare fact that a moment of free expression could be erased by state violence? It’s characteristic of Lalu’s book that you aren’t going to get a simple and immediate answer to this question, but instead you’re going to have to work for it. And I mean that in the best possible way. This is a book of complex negotiations with concepts, but the work of the reader in entering those negotiations is rewarded, not only with new insights but with a prose that’s careful and concise and a pleasure to read. You’ll encounter sentences such as

“The puppet keeps watch over the becoming technical of the human, resisting the slide into mechanized life that took shape as the logic of petty apartheid” (26) The image is from William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company’s performance of Jane Taylor’s “Ubu and the Truth Commission,” with Busi Zokufa and Adrian Kohler.

“Could there be a cure adequate to the wound inflicted on that fateful day in October, as the tragedy of apartheid resonated with the mythic sacking of Troy narrated in Homer’s Iliad” (162). The image is Giovanni Tiepolo’s “The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy”.

So what might Mandela have encountered? Those of us who went down to the Grand Parade to hear him speak will never forget it when he addressed the crowd with the words “Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans. I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all.”

Or when he ended with the words he had spoken decades earlier at the Rivonia trial in 1964: “’I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”

Mandela’s dream rests upon a particular understanding of race, domination, freedom, opportunity, agency, the possibilities open for political action. What he would have encountered is the undoing of each of these concepts. That’s why these are the key concepts Lalu examines in his book, and in each case, what he uncovers is remarkable, not only because it forces us to rethink what they meant and continue to mean in South Africa, but what they might mean in other societies too. But first, postapartheid South Africa. There are various ways to think about what Mandela wanted, what he achieved, what failed. Most of you will be familiar with narratives of political compromise, of being held hostage by global capital, of an idealism divorced from political realities, of a vision upended by corruption, etc. There has been much debate about what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission achieved and where it failed.

But what Premesh Lalu askes us to consider is what got lost every time a vision of South African society after apartheid failed to understand how apartheid had infiltrated everyday life in the practices of petty apartheid. Of course, much has been said and written about petty apartheid, but the achievement of this book is to make it clear that without an interrogation of petty apartheid, the concepts we use to think about South Africa after apartheid become hollow shells – words like freedom, opportunity, education, even race ring hollow. Because in the practices of petty apartheid, every day, these concepts were made and undone, again and again.

This is the underlying theme of the book, that an examination of petty apartheid’s intrusions into everyday life is the first step in thinking about South Africa after apartheid. In Lalu’s examination, petty apartheid was many things. It was a psychological disconnect between individual and group psychology. It was a cruel play with desire. But most important, perhaps, it was aesthetic, a manipulation of the senses. This is why the three test cases in his book are all aesthetic practices dissecting the subject of petty apartheid – the Handspring Puppet Company and William Kentridge’s adaptations of Goethe’s Faust, Büchner’s Woyzeck, and Jane Taylor’s reworking of Ubu the King. And by the way, as someone who has taught Woyzeck and Faust for years, I was amazed by Lalu’s insight into these works, and it was an absolute joy for me to gain new insights through his readings.

These stories all point to and perform what Lalu calls petty apartheid’s “psychic wreckage of everyday life” (13). Let me zero in on three of the concepts that get caught up in this psychic wreckage, Freedom, Education, and Race, then end with the idea of aesthetic education.

First there is freedom. How, Lalu asks in the introduction, might education re-enchant the search for freedom (19). Re-enchanting freedom is a theme that runs through the book. In Lalu’s reading, re-enchanting freedom means returning to the hope that Seamus Heaney pointed to in his The Cure at Troy, the hope of the distant shore. The idea of re-enchanting freedom is one that remains enigmatic in the book. Freedom is a concept that doesn’t travel well. Lalu’s immediate audience is one who knows the feeling of unfreedom in post-apartheid South Africa, and perhaps remembers it in apartheid South Africa. But elsewhere it does different work. In my part of the world it’s been co-opted by neo-liberalism (and I’m thinking of the “freedom convoy” that shut down the capital city of Canada last year, or the demands for “freedom” in the storming of the Capital in 2021). While it remains an open question how far beyond South Africa Lalu’s thoughts on freedom can travel, I believe much could be gained by adressing his thoughts on freedom in all cases where the concept appears to have political force.

Then education. Again and again, it was education that was at stake in the waves of protest that brought high school and university students onto the streets in the 70’s and 80’s. Of course, it was the right to a free and fair education, but Premesh Lalu shows that it was more. It was a torn and damaged sense of the human, with conflicting desires making life unliveable. I find it very compelling when Lalu asks historians of the student uprisings on the Cape Flats in 1985 to look beyond narratives of war and violence to see the impossible position of students who were pulled in two directions at once – on the one hand the desire for an education that would short circuit the education system’s “production of docile bodies” in the “passage from school to factory”, and on the other hand the desire for social mobility that would allow them to walk through the door opened by media images of a very different world from the one they occupied. It seems to me that this same impossible rift in desire is still at work 30 years later in 2015 when the #rhodesmustfall movement pulls in an opposite direction as #feesmustfall. Fees must fall demanding fair access to the kind of education that would allow social mobility , and Rhodes must fall demanding that education be reshaped outside the neo-liberal logic of social mobility.

Then race. What I take away from this book is that we cannot understand racism and racist social structures if we think we know what race is. We can’t know what race is without looking at the way the human objects of race-based unfreedom are forced in their everyday lives to reconstruct and perform race. And when I use the word “we” I’m evoking the kind of collective political project Lalu implies in his book. But “we” also decenters the place of thinking about unfreedom. In the South African context, and perhaps elsewhere too, ontologies of race have to give way to the kind of interrogation Lalu so beautifully demonstrates– interrogations into the entanglement of technology, aesthetics and biopolitics. I think Lalu’s comments on petty apartheid do travel well, leading me to conclude that this isn’t just a book about race in South Africa, but about race in general.

Finally, a word about the aesthetic and aesthetic education.

In the wake of the French revolution, Schiller contemplated the oncept of freedom, asking where its motivation might lie. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Human Beings (1795), he rejected the idea that freedom might be based on pure animal urges for violent upheaval or on idealist conceptions of society. He concluded that aesthetic education was the realm where freedom was possible. Premesh Lalu picks up on this and shows that it is the aesthetic where the difference between freedom and unfreedom is going to be worked out.

When Lalu speaks of the wound of Philoctetes, he shows that it is only the person bearing the wound who is in a position to educate the subject of political machinations. If you want to know what it’s like to suffer Philoctetes’s wound, ask Philoctetes. In Lalu’s conception, this asking but also the answer is the work of aesthetic education. And this education can’t be based on the rage of passion we find in Achilles nor on the cunning of reason in Odysseus. It has to be based on the aesthetic object. It has to come from the aesthetic object and be worked out in the aesthetic object.

Leave a comment

November 11, 2021

Little Amal in Glasgow

Little Amal is in Glasgow as one of the many witnesses to COP26. As national leaders, environmental activists, fossil fuel lobbyists and various other groups wrangle over a future with or without the devastating effects of climate change, Little Amal brings a different perspective. Standing beside Samoan climate activist Brianna Fruean, holding her hand, she towers above her and gazes out on the audience.

As I see her eyes, a surge of emotion floods over me. This girl-puppet-thing makes me think of so many other little girls who will grow up in a world whose dysfunctional system they will inherit, whose dysfunctional system we have created. Now she stands on the world-stage, faced with this system, dysfunctional politically, economically, technically and epistemologically.

Little Amal is not little, she is 3.5 meters tall, so she towers over the humans around her. She represents (or she is) a 10 year-old Syrian refugee child, and she is on a journey from the Turkish/Syrian border to Manchester England. Her journey began on July 27, 2021 in the city of Gaziantep, Turkey, 70 km north of the Syrian border, and 100 km from Aleppo. She has walked across Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and England. Now she is in Glasgow.

She stands behind Brianna Fruean, gazing over the assembled participants with a look that is, in my mind, partly impassive, partly angry, pitying, hopeful, desperate, frightened, disappointed. I see in her face and in her eyes the entire range of reactions to this frustratingly inertia-bound forum, this collection of powerful nations whose decades-long inaction on human-induced climate change is in part, perhaps in a large part, responsible for the worldwide walks of refugees. She bows her head while Fruean ask world leaders to “work and fight so that all little girls inherit the world that they deserve, to lay the foundation for change to grow.” Is his hope, or is it despair I see in Little Amal’s face? I don’t know, because, as the leaders talk and talk and talk, as they engage in what Greta Thunberg has called bla-bla-bla, she remains silent

She was created by the acclaimed Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa. Her handlers, those who make her move, have said: “I think she’s frightened, alone. She’s trying to put as much distance between her and the violence. Quite a frightened, traumatized little kid that has suddenly found herself all alone in the world … it’s frightening whether it happens to you in the supermarket, you can only imagine how frightening it is when it happens on this scale. There’s nobody here to help you, you can’t turn to the left and find mom’s hand. She is really in a survival flight mode when we meet her first.”

If there is going to be an alternative to the world Little Amal has inherited, I believe the door to the path leading there will be forced open in large part by the emotions aroused by this puppet. The interactions of humans and an inanimate human-thing remind us that we are here to take care of the inanimate world, at the same time that we take care of the animate world, at the same time that we take care of refugee children, like Little Amal.

Leave a comment

April 26, 2021

Stolen Person of the Forest

Several years ago, I took my 7-year-old daughter to the Berlin Zoo. A female Sumatra Orangutang, a Pongo abelii, clung to the bars, high above our heads in her enormous enclosure, which she shared with her family. Her arm was reaching through the wire, extended toward us, and she was fixing us with a steady gaze. There was something about this primate gaze I’d never encountered before. I reached out my hand, and when she saw this, she went away, then returned with a handful of straw which she had fashioned into something like a small, loosely bound basketball. She reached her hands through the bars and dropped her homemade ball outside the cage, just where I was standing. I reached out to catch it but missed. Seeing this, she left again, got another bunch, made another ball which she threw to me. This one I caught. She held out her hand to me, staring into my eyes, begging me to throw it back. I couldn’t reach her with it. But she didn’t stop looking into my eyes.

I can’t forget that gaze. I knew I wasn’t looking into human eyes, but the evocative intelligence felt no different. What did she want from me? What did she know that I didn’t know?

A silent exchange of gazes always raises questions erotic and epistemological. It evokes a bodily response that begs for some kind of intellectual reckoning. Kant might have called it sublime.

This reckoning, it seems to me, is being asked of us all the time by the gaze of other creatures. As a human, I’m used to gazing on nature’s eyes with a gaze that unknowingly divides humans from non-humans. I’m used to meeting the gaze of a non-human certain that I know something it doesn’t, that whatever a non-human might want from me can be directed by my own sense of expediency, pleasure perhaps.

But it was clear – there was a different intelligence in these eyes. Was this theatre she was staging? A performance of my collusion in her imprisonment? Was it a condemnation of my human intelligence, an intelligence that fashions cages for human pleasure and entertainment? Whatever she wanted from me, she clearly knew something I didn’t. This theatre was dramatizing the limits of my human intelligence, and the driving plot might have been my inability to offer her a way out of captivity. Or she might just have been coercing me into overcoming her boredom, performing for her, just for a couple of minutes.

Leave a comment

April 22, 2021

Kafka’s Ape. Gazing through captivity.

I recently had the privilege of watching the South African actor Tony Miyambo performing the ape Red Peter in Kafka’s Report to the Academy, adapted for the stage by Phala O. Phala.

In Kafka’s story, Red Peter has learned to mimic the gestures of human intelligence as a way out of captivity. Instead of pursuing an illusory freedom, he chooses the way out that he sees in the “murky gaze” of humans. Red Peter meets this murky gaze with his own intelligence. It is an intelligence that has chosen to avoid captivity by taking the human path.

Carl Hagenbeck, the entrepreneur who funded Red Peter’s capture, had been displaying Samoans, Africans, Inuit, and other “savages” alongside his wild beasts for more than 40 years by the time Kafka wrote his story.

When Kafka’s friend Max Brod (yes, he’s the one who purportedly was supposed to burn Kafka’s writings when Kafka died) – when Brod heard his wife Elsa read Kafka’s story aloud in the Prague Club for Jewish Women and Girls on 19 December 1917, Brod wrote that it was “the most ingenious satire of Jewish assimilation ever written.” I’m sure Brod is right, but Kafka’s ape knows much more than this.

When I watch Miyambo play Red Peter, I can see he knows something that I don’t, something intimately bound up with his embodied experience. “My skin is not necessarily my truth,” he says, but still “we are sealed in our bodies.” When Miyambo speaks as Red Peter, he is speaking as a post-apartheid South African in a body that South Africa’s apartheid government would have marked as suitable for captivity. The theft and captivity of apes from Africa is, as Donna Haraway observes, not very different from the enslavement of Africans – whether on African soil or elsewhere. When I watch Miyambo’s Red Peter explain with perfect logic how and why he found his way out of captivity, when I hear him interrupt this explanation with cries of pain, loss, appetite and desire, I start to suspect he is performing the emotional and epistemological distress shared by stolen primates and enslaved humans. The rift between his logical thought and his cries of fear, pain and trauma, is it the same rift that marks the everyday lives of black South Africans 27 years after the first democratic elections? Between the knowledge of democracy and the lasting experience of captivity in apartheid’s legacy?

It seems to me that Miyambo is asking me to rethink fundamental assumptions about who is marked for dehumanization, who counts as human and who does not, who has the right to make statements about human life, and who can be confined to captivity, to slavery. He is dramatizing my intellectual complicity in his own captivity – or at least in the marking of his body as suitable for captivity. I am, after all, one of the “esteemed gentlemen of the academy.”

Which is interesting, because the university is a special kind of academy. It has certainly long been complicit in marking bodies for captivity, and there are some startling examples of this from Miyambo’s country. For example Steven Robins’s remarkable discovery at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, of some relics of the eugenics studies carried out by the Nazi scientist, Eugen Fischer. Robins reports on this in his equally remarkable book Letters of Stone.

But the university was also founded as a place where harmful forms of knowledge could be worked out, worked through and worked against. Harmful in the sense that they inhibited the free unfolding of human potential. Universities have never rid themselves of the tension between this humanist ideal and its faulty, blinkered, or damaged implementation.

Leave a comment

January 12, 2021

Epistemodiversity and Monocultures of Knowledge

This is an idea I’ve been carrying around with me for a long time, and it reaches back to conversations in late 1980’s and early 1990’s South Africa with Peter Horn, an intellectual who had a profound influence on me. Peter Horn was an anti-apartheid activist and poet, and an eccentric scholar of German literature who penned what I think of as some of the first postcolonial interventions in German theory. But that’s another story.

The epistemodiversity story begins for me at the University of Cape Town in the troubled and elated years between 1987 and 1991, when Peter was dean of the Faculty of Arts. One day, in frustration, he told me of a meeting he had just attended where, once again, he was forced to defend a small humanities department against the humanities giants, like English, history, philosophy. At this time, universities across the world received shrinking state funding, and the humanities in general were facing a legitimacy crisis. Universities were seen increasingly as training places for the technologists who would keep society running smoothly as it was, and not a protected space where bold thinking was encouraged. As resources dwindled and legitimacy was questioned, the dominant metaphor for talking about small departments was Darwinian. Peter said he was tired of listening to people talk about survival of the fittest. If you wanted an analogy from evolutionary biology for talking about institutions, why not talk about biodiversity?

That was a long time ago. But I believe Peter was right in a much more profound way than quibbling over metaphors to describe the contest of faculties or squabbles between university disciplines. After all, there are very good reasons why his discipline and mine, German Studies, did not deserve a place in the apartheid and postapartheid university. But I’m interested in the reasons why it did. The apartheid and postapartheid university should never have privileged German Studies over African languages, but that is not an argument against German Studies. It’s an argument for African Languages.

The biodiversity model tells us we don’t have to choose one underfunded discipline over another one, just because neither of them produce patents or multi-million-dollar doners. The struggle for resources that leads to this choice is built on a false model, not only of life on this planet, but also of how to organize and institutionalize knowledge of life. The survival of the fittest can only lead to monocultures of learning which themselves imperil our ability to imagine alternatives to the ways of knowing that have brought us to this disastrous moment in human history.

Meanwhile, there are serious moves in institutions of higher learning worldwide to address the demise of languages, itself comparable to the death of species. There are some 6,000 languages in the world, but almost the entire population of the planet speaks 15 of them. And many of the remainder are threatened with extinction. The survival of some languages and the demise of others has a lot to do with the history of imperialism and its present iteration, economic globalization. My present university, the University of Toronto, has a history of privileging European languages over indigenous ones, similar to the apartheid university in South Africa. But recently, it is beginning to think about addressing this deficit on an institutional level.

The death of languages is a form of epistemicide, or in other words “the murder of knowledge. Unequal exchanges among cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence the death of the social groups that possessed it. In the most extreme cases, such as that of European expansion, epistemicide was one of the conditions of genocide.” That is a citation (p. 92) from a study on inequality in knowledges, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s 2014 book, Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide.

One subsection has the title: “The Ecology of Knowledge and the Inexhaustible Diversity of World Experience.” This is a precise banner for the idea of epistemodiversity. The observation is simple and convincing: “Throughout the world, there are not only very diverse forms of knowledge of matter, society, life, and spirit but also many and very diverse concepts of what counts as knowledge and the criteria that may be used to validate it” (p. 192).

Arguably, however, universities are not the right place to do justice to epistemodiversity. As mono-cultures of learning, they are more or less useless, with their built-in assumptions about the disciplinary structures of knowledge, their perpetuation of certain normalized career-subjectivities, their utilitarian relationship to funding, their fundamental belief that knowledge is inseparable from commerce, their perpetuation of social inequality, etc. etc. And, as the public funding of universities as a place of free inquiry and free education disappears, the uselessness of the university as a site of epistemodiversity is likely to increase.

When languages die, worlds die. But it’s not only languages in the narrow sense that see a struggle between diversity and mono-cultures. Think of google’s algorithms, delivering cascades of sameness to purportedly individualized publics (or pseudo-publics, to be more accurate). Think of how the politics of intellectual property and patents carefully excises pieces of knowledge from the systems in which they were intelligible, recasting them in mono-cultures where the only language they speak is financial. Think of the immense standardization of information storage and recall, where forms of preserving ideas are constantly made semi-obsolete, absorbed into the newer versions of software, which themselves are increasingly locked into hardware systems built with planned obsolescence.

It’s so simple really. The mono-cultural beliefs and practices that constitute knowledge in the world I occupy have produced disastrous consequences for humanity. Sure, they have produced wonderful effects and insights, but these often come about through strange coincidences and unexpected discoveries that themselves testify to the need to preserve epistemodiversity. And to expect the mono-cultures of knowledge to dig us out of the hole they made is not very wise. Where else do we turn, then? The first step is to realise that there is an “else” that needs to be taken seriously.

1 Comment

December 31, 2020

Information and Infection. Madness and Truth

In September 1791, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote a short piece intended for presentation at the so-called Friday-Society that had just been founded by his friend Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Herder gave his piece the title On Human Mania and Madness. Later, he included it in the 4th collection of his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity.

“No doubt, gentlemen, you have noticed when human bodies are dissected the many, infinitely fine threads that are so entangled within the brain, that the knife of the dissector can no longer follow them. The threads of mania and truth are just as finely entangled within the human psyche, perhaps more finely, so that, even after the most careful examination, it can scarcely be discerned in itself where the one is separated from the other.”

The point Herder was making has little to do with the history of cranial anatomy, in itself fascinating enough, and more with the way we choose to conceptualize evidence. For none of us can bypass mania in thinking, provided we understand mania in the way Herder did, as grounding “the greatest part of our experiences, the knowledge we learned earliest, habits we acquired early on, also our inclinations.” These all rest “either upon the testimony of our senses, or they come from other people whom we believe, whom we unconsciously mimic without noticing.”

What is more, mania “extends in particular to those things that concern a person primarily, their person and appearance, their class, their nation, their aims and character.” Mania is entangled with truth because knowledge of ourselves and the world is formed of concepts that are built out of pieces of non-knowledge. Mania, in this understanding, is like Plato’s mania in Phaedrus, a gift from the gods and not an achievement of human rational thinking. Socrates tells Phaedrus that “those men of old who invented names thought that madness was neither shameful nor disgraceful; otherwise they would not have connected the very word mania with the noblest of arts, that which foretells the future, by calling it the manic art. No, they gave this name thinking that mania, when it comes by gift of the gods, is a noble thing.” For Herder, rational thinking is not possible without mania, and it is the task of rational thinking to discern truth and distinguish it from madness.

Truth entangled with mania can lead to afflictions of the imagination, madness. “What doctors tell us in their reports concerning afflictions of the imagination, where this one thinks of his feet as straws, that one sees his buttocks as glass, and a third believes the world will be flooded when he passes water, all these stories and fairy tales tell us fundamentally less than the experience of mania found occasionally in the most reasonable of people.” Here, manic constructions are “solid castles in the air, built in earliest youth,” and they are both theoretical and practical.

Such afflictions are infectious. Like mirror neurons, the effects of entangled truth are communicated almost magically. “There is scarcely anything in the world as infectious as mania and madness. Truth must be painstakingly researched by its grounds.

Mania is adopted in good faith through mimesis, often unnoticeably, through complaisance, through the simple association with those who hold the mania, through partaking in their otherwise solid dispositions. Mania is communicated like yawning, just as facial expressions and moods are passed over to us, as one string answers another in harmony.”

This infectiousness has political implications. Power is consolidated by the ability to pass on a personal mania, a personal madness. The subordinate classes are less able to make their own personal mania look like truth. To speak of subordinate classes today implies not only social and economic subordinates, but also information subordinates. Information passes the mania of the powerful on to the passive recipients of information, unexamined, like a yawn. In the same way, mania and madness are embedded in the conventions of nations, for anything that “has taken root in a nation, whatever the people acknowledge and esteem, – how should that not be truth? Who would doubt it? Language, laws, education, forms of everyday life – all these consolidate it and all point to it. Whoever does not join in the mania is an idiot, an enemy, a heretic, a foreigner.” Mania and madness are also embedded in language. “Innocent colours, the green and the blue, the black and the white, code words that are not associated with any concept, signs that express nothing – all these, as soon as they became partisan, have confounded the minds in madness, torn apart friendships and families, murdered people and devastated countries.” Herder believes it would be possible to “derive from them a dictionary of human mania and madness.”

How then, if thinking itself follows well worn paths grounded in our own specific experiences, is it possible to untangle mania and truth? The point is, you can’t. “Mania and madness are not as far apart as one might believe. As long as mania resides in a corner of the psyche, where it assaults only a few ideas, it retains this name. If it extends its command further and reveals itself through more vivid actions, it is called madness. Who is able to determine the more and the less at all times? Particularly considering that, for individuals as well as entire nations, and according to the circumstances and the times, nothing but convention holds the scales and assigns names.” Instead, there are practical consequences to be drawn.

Lesson one for Herder is a lesson of history and tolerance. “History teaches us that such contingencies of the human spirit have played out and come to an end already thousands and thousands of times, only under different circumstances and names. And so we will be careful to tolerate harmless mania and avoid harmful mania.”

Lesson two is that human mania cannot be eradicated by force or violence. “Errors are neither countered nor eliminated by way of arms, and even the most miserable mania considers itself the truth of a martyr as soon as it stands dyed in blood.”

Lesson three is that, where mania becomes madness, an affliction of the imagination, it is highly infectious and, like a virus, can only be contained by isolation. “There are many examples of sympathetic orderlies themselves being infected with the illness they were attending, and nothing is as infectious as illnesses of the psyche. Let those who are healthy seek to remain healthy. Infections can only be contained by isolating them.”

Lesson four is that “free examination of truth from all perspectives is the only remedy against all kinds of mania and error. Let those who hold a mania defend their mania and those who hold divergent opinions defend their opinions. That is their affair. Even if neither one is healed, every contested error provides impartial people with a new ground for truth, a new perspective on it.”

In the end, “a long and much-purified mania stands as truth for humans.”

Leave a comment