Mr. Cogito greets you

To all newcomers and new readers, Mr. Cogito says hello. As you are now privy to secret knowledge, the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg will be watching.

The Case of Alonso Quijano

No one ever asks what prompted Alonso Quijano, the legendary Don Quixote, to read so much fantasy literature in his late forties. We know he once infamously tilted at a windmill in his rusty armor on his old nag -- just one of a series of strange misadventures on his illusory quest -- because of what he read in that literature, and the prodigious doses in which he read it. It is generally known from Cervantes' great novel that Quijano, an impoverished Hidalgo of the village of La Mancha, went mad from excessive reading in a genre unsuited to reality. But we know almost nothing of his back story, save for what can be inferred from his status, age, and accoutrements. He is simply "one of those gentlemen with a lance in the lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound." Do we need to know more? Probably not. Alonso Quijano is more recognizable to us through the things he owns than through a description of his past.

Which does not mean he has no past. What caused him then to devote all his waking hours to chivalric romances? Perhaps if we turn our gaze to the unused lance on its rack, the rusting shield festooned with cobwebs, and the old charger, we might understand that old gentleman more clearly. They are the traces of his noble lineage, the relics of a would-be knight errant whose own chanson de geste is sounded in his mind, a mind more expansive and clamorous with every novel he touches. Can you hear his song? It's becoming more audible as it becomes less reasonable. But it's no less reasonable than it is intensely satisfying, for Alonso Quijano's world to this moment has been a of tedium, disappointment, and resentment. He is at last becoming the hero of his own longed-for narrative, a hero of his time and ours, and the world around him seems to be changing for him -- dragons and giants are materializing across the land, notorious brigands are creeping off yellowing pages, fair ladies and duchesses are appearing in castle towers.

After setting aside the last book he will ever read, Alonso Quijano puts out the candle, lays himself on his straw-filled bed, and thinks of a new name with which to meet this new world. Before he falls asleep, he will murmur to himself a name as fitting to him as it is unusual and famous to the rest of us: Don Quixote.

Jacob Bronowski, The Identity of Man

In his series of essays, The Identity of Man (1965), Bronowski assumed the difficult task of vindicating science by humanizing it. His provocative question—is man a self or a machine?—set the stage for a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between science and the humanities. What do they have in common? How are they different? Why does the self seek refuge from science? The answers, Bronowski hoped, would help restore the integrity of science and provide a total philosophy “which shows how a man thinks and feels, how he makes his values, what man is—which integrates afresh the experiences which always have been and are human.” The triumph of these essays lies in their illumination of man’s unique identity as a thinker and imaginer, whose unparalleled cognitive traits are the basis of his freedom. 

1984: Between Memory and History

Few things are as disturbing to an historian as the future in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Here is a future of radical authoritarianism, where the state controls and monitors every aspect of human life, including memory. Events and experiences of past and present are salvageable insofar as they legitimize the regime’s dominance. In this dystopian world the historians are “ministers of Truth,” engaged daily in both the revision of artifacts and documents, and their systematic destruction. Nothing is free, not even the consciousness of history. The questionable O’Brien puts it distinctly: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

1984 raises very serious questions. What happens, for example, when memory is preempted and recreated? How does society change when the act of remembering has been restricted? What is the fate of a people’s identity when their past is confiscated? These questions are particularly relevant in the context of Pierre Nora’s article, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” in which the author suggests that a prominent condition of modernity is the replacement of lived memory with critical history, the substitution of sites of memory for real environments of memory. However, the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century—of which the hegemony of memory is a prime symptom—complicates Nora’s argument, especially where it equates modernity with the effort to achieve historical exactitude. 1984 is only a fictionalized model for a world in which collective memory and milieux de mémoire have been invented, but there are real examples, particularly in Germany under the Third Reich and in the Soviet empire after the Second World War. What this evidence suggests is that lived memory can be revived, though drastically distorted, if only to maintain the power of a ruling group. In turn, the will to remember is not necessarily endemic to the modern age, but must struggle with the will to reinvent the past.

The Cry in the Orchard

At the far end of the orchard one night, Claire was plucking apples from a tree and dropping them into a burlap bag when, suddenly, a cry from the other side of the brick wall startled her. She waited silently to hear the cry again. She couldn’t tell if it was a human cry, or the cry of an animal. The night wind trailed briskly through the long grass and the dried fallen leaves, and touched Claire’s fingertips. The cry was indistinct. It could have been a cry of pain or a laugh. But Claire would never know. Silence crept back into the corner of the orchard, and the cry was heard no more.

Jacob Bronowski's Science

Jacob Bronowski identified a modern myth whose origins, he claimed, could be traced to the Industrial Revolution: the fear that man was becoming, ever more swiftly, a machine at the hands of modern science. When Bronowski entered the culture wars of the mid-twentieth century, sparked by C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures—addressing the breakdown in communication between scientists and literary intellectuals — he wanted to expose this myth, dispel false and antiquated notions of science, and illuminate the human being’s unique position in the natural world. His series of essays, The Identity of Man, is a valiant attempt to humanize science, and simultaneously, to popularize it. Only by discerning, as Bronowski believed, the inextricable relationship between science and the arts — by recovering the integrity of science — could one begin to appreciate man’s extraordinary, albeit material, nature. Unlike Snow’s treatise, whose political agenda bears the marks of Cold War anxieties and personal antipathies, Bronowski’s essays constitute a total philosophy of modern life, whereby a sound education in humanistic science is the basis for self-affirmation and the preservation of citizenship and democracy.

Reflections on 1968

In 1968, the world abounded with young idealists: student radicals, third world guerillas, disaffected intellectuals, Dany Cohn-Bendits, Rudi-Dutschkes, and Adam Michniks. They came out en masse in 1968 – symptomatic of the “eros effect,” as theorized by George Katsiaficas – initially to challenge local authority structures, and ultimately to attack oppression and injustice everywhere, especially in imperialist, hyper-capitalist, Communist, and underdeveloped societies. In the global revolution that ensued, the New Left – as this emergent vanguard of the socialist movement came to be known – recognized that its own interests lay in the equality and freedom of self-determination of all people: instinctual needs that, when realized, might culminate in utopia.

And yet, while the events of 1968 were wider in scope – politically, culturally, and geographically – than the liberal revolutions of 1830 and 1848, they ended nonetheless in disappointment, disillusionment, and shock. In popular memory, the failure of 1968 is attributed to any of several factors, like the overwhelming resistance of the state, the degeneration of revolutionary fervor into counterrevolutionary hedonism, and the lack of mass support from the working classes for the student movement. This last factor needs to be considered in detail, not least because it has provoked unwarranted criticism of the working class as an apathetic collective force resistant to revolutionary change. In reality, no single explanation can account for the breakdown of the student-worker alliances that manifested, to varying degrees of success, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The socio-political context in which each movement originated was significantly different from every other, so that each must be assessed and respected on its own terms. What these movements all had in common, however, was the student movement’s ability to identify existentially with oppressed peoples around the word, and in particular, with the working class. An alliance between these two parties, as national governments feared, could pose an irresistible threat to their dominance.