The Meaning of Words: Rob Riemen on Art and Communication

Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.

 

Rob Riemen: [Reads Nobility of Spirit, Part One, pages 20 - 21.]

 

Carlin M. Wragg: To begin, I wanted to start with this question: Why did you want to write a book? You have the Nexus Institute — this is something that you do. Why was the next step for you writing, not a novel, but something that read like literature?

 

Rob Riemen: The book is a little reflection on the stages of my life. The first chapter is on Thomas Mann and I wrote it on the occasion of the fact when his daughter, his youngest beloved child, Elizabeth Mann-Borgese, at my request, came to The Netherlands, came to my institute, to give a public lecture with the same title that her father gave when he became seventy-five; she was eighty.

 

When she came to The Netherlands I realized that this famous lecture of Thomas Mann’s, “The Years of My Life,” which is a very interesting kind of autobiographical reflection on his life — he starts with “I do not want to talk about my life, but I do want to talk about the things which happened in my life.” He starts in 1875 when he was born and, skipping the private parts, he talks about the turning points in his life and the turning points in his lifetime. I asked his daughter, “Can you do the same?” and she did. It turned out that this famous lecture of Thomas Mann’s was not published in Dutch at all so I decided to have this published in a small, beautiful book.

 

For me it was the moment, the occasion, to summarize what Thomas meant to me. I wanted to convey to the readers why this man became my school of education. Thomas Mann for me is not somebody who is just a great novelist. And I read all the novels; I read his essays, I read his letters, I read his diaries — ten huge volumes — and he became my school of education, just as Goethe was his school of education.

 

RR: This was 1999. Only two years later we had 9/11 and I happened to be in America. I was in America and I was confronted with the fact that when great intellectuals — novelists, public intellectuals — presented their view on 9/11, which essentially came down to the notion: “Of course we disagree with the violence used, but we have to understand that this was an attack on capitalism, globalism.” they therefore, in one way or another, legitimized it. It was not only here in America, it was in London, it was in Paris, it was in Germany, it was everywhere. There was, basically, a kind of leftist intellectual elite who thought they had to legitimize 9/11.

 

I was in a state of shock because my father was a union leader and I grew The Nexus Institute is a small but international organization where we communicate the basic message, ‘We want you to think, we want you to read books, we want you to listen to music, because that can be helpful in making your own judgments.’up in an environment where — quote, unquote — one of the lessons learned after two World Wars was that in a civilized society you do not use violence to change society. Martin Luther King knew that, everybody who was involved with the Civil Rights Movement, people who got involved with Amnesty International, or with Greenpeace, environmental issues, and, like my father, union leaders, knew that you have to be very critical, you have to change society, that there is injustice, social injustice, but that you should never use violence. Suddenly there was this group of intellectuals who thought they had to legitimize violence.

 

RR: If I’m not writing, I’m running The Nexus Institute. The Nexus Institute is a small but international organization where, through conferences and lectures for a huge, general audience, we communicate the basic message, “We want you to think, we want you to read books, we want you to listen to music, because that can be helpful in making your own judgments.” If all those high-minded intellectuals, who read everything and who know everything, at the end of the day cannot make a sound moral judgment in terms of right and wrong, good and evil, then why should I continue?

 

Of course, anyone who knows a little history knows about the treason of clerics — the betrayal of the intellectuals; Julien Benda wrote a very great book on it — and we know about the involvement of intellectuals with Fascism, we know about the involvement of intellectuals with the Hitler regime — Heidegger is the most famous example, but there are many more — we know about the corruption of intellectuals when it comes to Marxism, Leninism, that there were only a few courageous people who said, “No, no, no, this can never be our world,” so we know about that. Yet I can tell you it makes a difference if you experience something yourself and it’s not still a part of history.

 

Suddenly what I knew from history became a very concrete thing, it became something which I myself wanted to find an answer for: Why is it that I’m reading all these books? Why is it that I think that great music matters? Why is it that I think that it is unacceptable if a rich society, which the West is, doesn’t invest in culture, or art education? Why is it that I disagree with all kinds of business people or politicians who think that art education is not very useful? I had to find an answer.

 

RR: The second essay is my own quest, starting with Socrates, using the conversations which are — quote, unquote — recorded by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, in Doctor Faustus — Doctor Faustus is Mann’s great novel in which he had to deal with how the big professors, the doctor — doctors, people with all kinds of PhDs, were supporting Fascism — to tell the story of my own quest and how I finally came to form a kind of idea about what the essence of culture is all about, what intellectual life should be all about, what the responsibility of intellectuals should be.

 

I tell it in the form of conversations, stories, because, first of all, when you write you write for pleasure, and for me there is no pleasure in writing “…how I finally came to form a kind of idea about what the essence of culture is all about, what intellectual life should be all about, what the responsibility of intellectuals should be.”something academic. But there is something more important at stake and that is that I wanted to convey, one way or the other, a notion which connects the whole book, which is at the core of the life of Thomas Mann, and at the core of the life of Leone Ginzburg who was a great admirer of Thomas Mann, though I don’t think Thomas Mann ever heard of him, and which is at the core of this debate that I construct about the responsibility of the intellectual; this phrase is “nobility of spirit.”

 

RR: In my opening I explain that this is a notion which Goethe came across when he was writing his autobiography. He comes across an old letter from a friend of the great painter and sculptor Albrecht Dürer, and this old nobleman says, “I no longer want to be part of this nobility based on the blood of my family, I’m only interested in the nobility of spirit.” This became a very famous and important idea to Goethe.

 

Thomas Mann, whose intellectual life — definitely after World War I — was so much constructed and modeled on the life of Goethe. He wrote his best essays on Goethe and he wrote a whole novel on the life of Goethe, Lotte in Weimar. He published in 1945 his finest collection of essays, subtitled, Sixteen Essays on the Problems of Mankind, the problems of humanity, with as its title, Nobility of Spirit. When you can publish a book called Nobility of Spirit in 1945 knowing that the whole culture of the world you come from is completely in ruins, this is a very telling title. He must have thought about it a long time. I know from his diaries that originally he played with another title before he decided on Nobility of Spirit.

 

Since then people have stopped using the phrase. But I see my life, essentially, as a kind of mission to restore the meaning of certain words, to say or to ask “why is it we should give up certain things?” I deliberately decided “okay, this will be the title of my book.” So I had a strong feeling that I had to write this in a kind of literary form to try to express a certain experience, what it is. Hopefully, definitely in the last chapter on Leone Ginzburg, when people read this story, though it still will be difficult to say what nobility of spirit is, they have had a certain experience of a man who lived nobility of spirit.

 

CMW: This is not the only character — figure may be a better word — who was interested in this idea. There’s another gentleman who appears very early. Could you talk a bit about him, and name him, and say why he was important to you to include? Also, why does he come in so early?

 

RR: Joseph Goodman; a very old, strange man, whom I only met once. The story is the following: The Nexus Institute, which I founded and preside over, organizes every year an annual conference. The setting of the conference is that we ask a large, big question and we invite a rich variety of people — intellectuals, academics, journalists, politicians, artists, musicians — to say something about this topic in a conversation with others.

 

I came to America in November of 2001 to organize a conference, believe it or not, on evil. This was part of a series entitled “The Quest of Life.” One was on love and death, two on evil, and the third, the anatomy of loss.

 

The choice to do a conference on evil was picked way before 9/11 and so, as I always want to meet my speakers in advance, on this trip I would meet John Coetzee, the great novelist from South Africa who knows everything about evil, Joseph Frank, the biographer of Dostoyevsky, Daniel Goldhagen in Harvard who wrote a book on anti-Semitism in Germany, Michael Ignatieff, the human rights expert who published a book on the lesser evil. It was scheduled already for a long time.

 

RR: When I’m traveling, although I’m busy I always try to meet some of my friends. It turned out that I could meet my dear friend Elizabeth Mann-Borgese, the daughter of Thomas Mann. We could meet in New York in the River Café with this wonderful view of the Statue of Liberty.

 

She had an old friend and I — I read everything about Thomas Mann, and I also read a lot about Elizabeth — in no biography or anything else will you find one piece of information about this man.

 

He too came from Germany in 1938. Elizabeth, Thomas Mann and his wife Katia Pringsheim, were invited by the captain to be at the captain’s table, yet apparently in steerage there was a guy who, when he came to America, called himself Joseph Goodman, I mean definitely it’s not his own name, right?

 

They met because when Elizabeth came to America she still had in her mind to become a concert pianist and she went very often to New York to take piano lessons. There she met a strange guy, Joseph Goodman.

 

Elizabeth was telling me this story when she has to inform me, “Yes, well, of course we can meet but, Rob, you have to know there is somebody I know and…” Anyway, so she tells this story, very movingly, that there’s this man whom she met for the first time, what was it? ‘38? ‘39? Ages ago. And he was the better piano player. He was the real genius.

 

RR: When we were talking about 9/11 two months later — what to do next, the War on Terror — Elizabeth, who had become very critical about America, for good reason, she moved to Canada, she felt disappointed by America, there was this old friend of hers and suddenly he put on the table a work in progress, sketches for a composition “He wanted to convey, through the work of Walt Whitman, something that would give back to America its original spirit, its original dream, which is, indeed, so much a part of the work of Walt Whitman.”entitled “Nobility of Spirit: Words of Walt Whitman.”

 

Just as I’m so enthusiastic about Thomas Mann and he became my school of education, Walt Whitman was Goodman’s school of education. He wanted to convey, through the work of Walt Whitman, something that would give back to America its original spirit, its original dream, which is, indeed, so much a part of the work of Walt Whitman. It’s in Leaves of Grass, it’s in Democratic Visions. He wanted to inspire Americans again with his composition and get the true spirit of America back.

 

RR: Well, I did my job, I met the people. I returned home. Goodman sent me a copy of Leaves of Grass — I knew about Walt Whitman but I never had read Walt Whitman — and early next year, in 2002, it turned out that he had died, which was a great shock for Elizabeth.

 

My wife and I were supposed to meet Elizabeth in Switzerland where she always had her skiing holidays. And more or less a week before we had to go, Elizabeth died very unexpectedly as well. In my grief, having a week off because there was no reason anymore to go to Switzerland, I started to read Goethe. I found this paragraph where he writes about this old nobleman who wants to live the nobility of spirit, and I made the connection to the work of Goodman.

 

It was due to my meeting with Elizabeth and Goodman that I felt I had to write about the questions by which I became obsessed. I also felt very encouraged by Goodman, encouraged that I could do it in a completely different way, that there was no need any longer even to write it in the form of a classical essay.

 

CMW: I think one of the most exciting things about the form that you’ve chosen, which is really embodied by these two figures who appear in the book, and who really live large in your life and the creation of this work, is that the form you’ve chosen is accessible to everyone, it’s available to all readers. It’s not written in a way that’s isolated in the academy where you may need to know a certain kind of language in order to understand the concepts being talked about.

 

CMW: I felt like, when I read this portion of the book, it was so right to include this unknown figure alongside a well-known figure because it symbolized a place for everyone coming to the book to step in and to start reading about Thomas Mann, and to read about the other ideas that you mention.

 

One of the concepts I wanted to parse out is the related ideas of Truth, and Beauty, and Goodness. These are concepts which Socrates talks about, and other philosophers talk about over time, that have, not specific meanings, but large meanings and important meanings that are different than Happiness, for example.

 

Could you talk a little bit about them for somebody who may not have read what Socrates said? This way we can begin thinking about why these are big ideas and why it’s important that they are big ideas.

 

RR: One of the most fascinating but also troublesome aspects of the way philosophy nowadays is practiced, especially in academia, and even more especially in American academia, is that it has become something very analytical, technological, yet the meaning of the word is -philo -sophia, “love for wisdom.”

 

It seems almost like the whole notion of wisdom has disappeared from philosophy education. I think that’s a mistake, and even more than a mistake, that we have lost something of great importance because if philosophy doesn’t give us wisdom then where is that wisdom to be found? As if we can live without wisdom.

 

RR: Part of this is that words, which used to have great importance and meaning, like Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, also disappeared, as if we feel uncomfortable with them. There is a historical reason, or there is a more historical reason. An important historical reason relates to the notion of Socrates himself, Plato maybe. It’s the idea that Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are essentially one, that they belong together. Where you find Beauty you’ll find Goodness, where you find Goodness you’ll find Truth.

 

Now this is something we can no longer believe in. We have had in European history the great, impressive, inescapable figure of Friedrich Nietzsche. One can never understand contemporary society and our recent history without Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s the man who — quote, unquote — for Europe predicted two hundred years of nihilism, and we are only midway, we only have had one hundred years. Well, what a one hundred years! The figures of people who died in two World Wars are close to one hundred million. It is not only the wars; it’s this totalitarianism from the left and the right which millions and millions and millions of people believed in. It’s the legacy of two World Wars. It’s the ongoing difficult relationship between America and Europe, the new world and the old world.

 

Nietzsche and his prediction of nihilism basically wanted to express the idea that there is no meaning in words. There is no meaning whatsoever. Everything is meaningless. Your life is meaningless. There is no answer to the big questions of what’s the purpose of life? What’s the meaning of life? Accept the fact that everything’s meaningless. There is no Truth. Truth is only a perception. Beauty, there’s nothing behind it. It’s an excuse, you know, it wants to make you feel good but, pffft.

 

RR: And Goodness? What kind of Goodness? Why Goodness? Beyond Good and Evil is one of the titles of his books and that’s the situation we are in: beyond good and evil.

 

What has meaning? What is there to believe in? And so, more or less as a kind of escape from that, we focused on the pursuit of happiness. Well, our idea of what happiness is all about is not really happiness or, I think, what the founding fathers of America had in mind. “What has meaning? What is there to believe in? And so, more or less as a kind of escape from that, we focused on the pursuit of happiness. Well, our idea of what happiness is all about is not really happiness or, I think, what the founding fathers of America had in mind.”But anyway, to feel good, to be happy, to be hip, those are the notions of our society. At the same time, my guess is, many people feel quite uncomfortable.

 

We cannot live without Truth. This is also the message of 1984 of George Orwell. It’s even the message of Brave New World of Aldous Huxley where there’s still a kind of beauty, but it’s a hollow beauty and there is no connection between Beauty and Truth.

 

When words no longer tell the truth, when words turn into lies, language dies, and we with the language. It’s the first and foremost task of every poet, of every novelist, to write meaningful words, to write truthful words. You don’t have to be religious, or a philosopher, or a great expert on Plato to realize that a language cannot be without Truth.

 

RR: One of the things that went wrong with America during the Bush era was that there were too many words out there like “Mission Accomplished,” which many Americans believed but which was a lie, and that if we continue for way too long using words which are no longer truthful, words, for example, where love is reduced to the idea of romance, where love is confused with being in love, but being in love is not the same as to love somebody, then we will lose track.

 

Now, I don’t want to go into a kind of philosophical argument but if we realize that Truth matters, and if we realize that Goodness matters, that that kind of moral integrity matters, and that there is Good and Evil, that there is right and wrong, and that it is not the same, and that it is a silly and dangerous idea to think that “well Goodness is just what people think about,” then what’s our line of defense against people like bin Laden, who really think that they’re doing things in good faith?

 

This might give us the idea that Beauty matters as well and that probably there is something very profound in this notion of Socrates, that those people who live in truth, whatever their life is, which can be everything — they can be the doorman, they can be a writer, they can be a nurse, they can be a mother or father, it doesn’t matter — but that those people who live their lives in truth, that is to say those who never compromise in terms of human dignity and treating other people in terms of human dignity, that there is a certain goodness in their life. And therefore their life is beautiful, irrespective of their looks, irrespective of their clothes, irrespective of their house, anything, and what we can say about those people is what beautiful people they are. You see? So it does matter.

 

CMW: I think there’s something important and very timely about this concept. I think one of the critiques that could be laid on the ground at the feet of philosophy is the question of its relevance to our day-to-day lives. This is part of where the culture has gone, that concerns like, “I need to put food on my family’s table,” and “I need to send my kids to college,” or whatever the issue may be, are completely independent of these ideas. But what you’ve just said is that these principles, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, are at the very heart of “…if we continue using words which are no longer truthful, words, for example, where love is reduced to the idea of romance, where love is confused with being in love, but being in love is not the same as to love somebody, then we will lose track.”those decisions, and that they give value to very ordinary goals. I wonder if you can talk about that? Why is it important right now, when there are many people who are struggling and who are engaged in a life that may be full of disappointment, to have something like this on the mind?

 

RR: Well, especially when so many things are happening now; we know that the golden era is over, we know that unemployment is on the rise, we do not even know what the real impact of the financial crisis will be, not to mention foreign policy and crazy people with crazy things and crazy bombs. Many things can happen and many people are struggling. This is always the case, but now even more.

 

RR: One of the lessons to be learned is that what has been our focus for way too long, that the rich are our true heroes, is no longer true. Well, it was never true, but they lost their disguise; we know they were in the game only for themselves. So then decisions have to be made: What to do next? How to move forward? As Americans say and I love the expression, “upward and onward,” right? But again, where to go to?

 

My modest proposition would be the following: For so long, for so long, and so, unfortunately, it’s deeply ingrained in American society, everything has been focused on usefulness, everything has to be useful and most useful are those things which are “smart.” Read the New York Times and definitely the op-ed page and you’ll see we need smart energy, smart cars, it’s a smart person, smart books. But again, smart and usefulness are twin brothers, they go together. The problem is that this notion of usefulness has replaced another notion: meaningfulness.

 

More and more people are starting to realize that although they are doing a lot of useful things and trying to be smart as well, there is a certain kind of emptiness, there is a certain experience of meaninglessness. Yes, I’m working very hard, yes, I’m making this money, yes, we can buy the next car, or the second car, or the third car, or whatever, but why? What’s the meaning of it?

 

We have forgotten a fundamental dimension of life which is always there, and the point is that if we ourselves are not aware of this dimension, definitely when things are becoming really difficult, many people feel that there is a kind of temptation to give into those people who tell you, “Well I understand how difficult life is for you. I understand your worries, etcetera, etcetera. Believe in me. Believe in me. Do what I tell you. If you just follow my instructions…”

 

RR: Those people can be everybody. They can be an ordinary charlatan, they can be a drug dealer, they can be those people that are running those megachurches on television — just give me your money and believe in, whatever — and they are dangerous people. I think they are dangerous because, in the end, there is nothing they have to offer, just forms of idolatry.

 

Life is not easy; this is one of the first things we have to accept. Life is not easy, so we have to deal with it. The way to deal with it is to make sure that we can think about it, that we ask the right questions, that we are critical — that we are critical towards ourselves and that we “We can never make the right decisions if we don’t have a certain wisdom. We can never live a meaningful life if there is no love in it, true love in it, if there is no true friendship in it…”are also critical in terms of what we want to believe, yes or no.

 

I don’t want to tell people what to believe or what not to believe, I’m not in the business of telling people what they have to do and not to do. I’m not interested in these things at all, first and foremost, because people have to decide for themselves; it’s their life, their experiences, their troubles, they have to deal with it.

 

But a few things are simple: We can never make the right decisions if we don’t have a certain wisdom. We can never live a meaningful life if there is no love in it, true love in it, if there is no true friendship in it, if we don’t develop a certain sensitivity for the things that really matter, and if we don’t realize that truthfulness and goodness and trying to become beautiful, not in terms of “wow, what a glamorous person,” but in terms of being a beautiful human being, that these things are the quintessence of life.

 

RR: Now, next to this people have their different talents. One is good in A, the other is good in B, that’s the richness of life, that’s the richness of our world. So develop your talent, but deal with it in a responsible way, and let this responsibility be part of a much larger setting in which you are constantly dealing with this question which, according to Socrates, is the mother of all questions, and that is: What is a good life?

 

CMW: I want to ask you then about the role that art can play in helping us understand a meaningful life, and doing things that lead us to have a meaningful life.

 

RR: Yes, well part of this complex phenomenon called being human, human life, is there are no simple things, there are no simple ways to live the good life. You cannot take a prescription which will provide you with everything you’re hoping for. Not science, not religion — religion by definition is double-faced — unfortunately also not art and beauty. It’s not the case.

 

Having said this, the following, I think, is important: I do believe that art matters because the quintessence of life is the art of communication; to be able to express yourself, to be able to understand your own emotions, to be able to communicate your experiences.

 

RR: There is no love, no friendship, no sense of community possible without communication, and the quality of a love, a friendship, and people being together is based on the quality “I do believe that art matters because the quintessence of life is the art of communication; to be able to express yourself, to be able to understand your own emotions, to be able to communicate your experiences.”of their communication.

 

Art is the only language we have to express our most profound emotions and experiences. Mathematics cannot do it, economics cannot do it, technology cannot do it — they have nothing to express. The first experience which you have when real life is there, when you’re profoundly in love, or you have just lost your love, or the first time that you’re confronted with death, is that there are poems, there is music, there are novels in which you read your own experience. “Hey, it’s there, I’m not alone. I’m not the first one. What I feel now is there.” So already you can say to people, “Listen to this, read this, look at this, this is how I feel, this is how I am,” which is already an enormous form of liberation. This is the kind of communication we need to be human.