Les Miserables: Introduction
As mentioned previously, I'm reading Les Miserables with jackspade64 (Modern Library Classics edition with translation by Julie Rose). The current plan is to read one chapter a week and then discuss over Skype. In that regards, some things from Gopnik's introduction that I found interesting:
"[Hugo] believes in individual acts, even heroic individual acts, and he believes that liberty is the precondition of that kind of heroism." (xviii)
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Is this true? And what exactly is liberty? (i.e. Does Hugo mean "liberty" in the Enlightenment sense, or the free will sense?) Does heroism presuppose individual liberty, or simply freedom of choice? If so, what does that mean for individuals and humanity (both specifically and generally)?
Metaphor of intellectual work as mining. "Against the Enlightenment metaphor of intellectual work as tower-making or bridge-building, reaching upward toward heaven or the far shore, Hugo proposes that thinking is a kind of delving in the dark, a Dante-like decent toward something mysterious and unknown. At each level the miners find new jewels, but farther down is a deeper inferno of pure will. You dig deep to reach wisdom, but if you dig deeper you find raw hate and animal passion... But Hugo's real point is apparent: sane minds are always forged over an inferno of passion and hatred; the job of the poet or philosopher is to open a vein into the mind that delves into the possibilities of the soul without getting us too deep into the rule of the will. It's dark down there, but the darkness is the only place where we can work, and in the darkness something can be found." (xix)
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I find that I am drawn to this notion of "Thinking as Mining", both for the complexity of human motivation that it presupposes and it's primality as opposed to the stark purity of the "Ivory Tower" interpretation. But does the metaphor hold up? Is it too Freudian, too much of a self-cancelation? Or do human beings really operate/think in this manner? More importantly, how does one reach sanity? How is the balance between intellect and will sustained? Conversely, what causes it to fail?
"[Hugo] believes in individual acts, even heroic individual acts, and he believes that liberty is the precondition of that kind of heroism." (xviii)
--
Is this true? And what exactly is liberty? (i.e. Does Hugo mean "liberty" in the Enlightenment sense, or the free will sense?) Does heroism presuppose individual liberty, or simply freedom of choice? If so, what does that mean for individuals and humanity (both specifically and generally)?
Metaphor of intellectual work as mining. "Against the Enlightenment metaphor of intellectual work as tower-making or bridge-building, reaching upward toward heaven or the far shore, Hugo proposes that thinking is a kind of delving in the dark, a Dante-like decent toward something mysterious and unknown. At each level the miners find new jewels, but farther down is a deeper inferno of pure will. You dig deep to reach wisdom, but if you dig deeper you find raw hate and animal passion... But Hugo's real point is apparent: sane minds are always forged over an inferno of passion and hatred; the job of the poet or philosopher is to open a vein into the mind that delves into the possibilities of the soul without getting us too deep into the rule of the will. It's dark down there, but the darkness is the only place where we can work, and in the darkness something can be found." (xix)
--
I find that I am drawn to this notion of "Thinking as Mining", both for the complexity of human motivation that it presupposes and it's primality as opposed to the stark purity of the "Ivory Tower" interpretation. But does the metaphor hold up? Is it too Freudian, too much of a self-cancelation? Or do human beings really operate/think in this manner? More importantly, how does one reach sanity? How is the balance between intellect and will sustained? Conversely, what causes it to fail?