The uncertain approximation

"Lermontov has his cup of black coffee in one hand, a solitary sugar cube in the other. While speaking to the student, maintaining eye contact all the while, he dips the corner of the cube into the coffee. We see it change color, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. It doesn't burst. He delivers his final line, the student walks out, and he pops the soaked cube in his mouth, finally taking a sip of coffee. It is the height of audacity that he thought the cube would not crumble without his permission..."

http://alexvanburen.com/2009/11/14/the-red-shoes-a-sugar-cubist-perspective.aspx

Peter Gay

Franz Werfel recalled the time of the First World War almost with [66] fondness as a time when “the word still had power,” and the word he meant was the word of the poet, the sacred figure one could safely entrust with authority. But things were not so simple. Men of the word tend to overestimate the power of the word. It is an old illusion, let over from neoclassical theory, that poetry and the drama have immediate and direct effects, persuading the audience to action. But for many, even in Weimar, poetry and the theatre were entertaining or civilizing forces, with no, or only indirect and subtle, effects on conviction and conduct. Whatever poets might fear – or desire – poetry was simply not propaganda. Besides, as I have suggested, the kind of poet the Germans seemed to love most lent himself to conflicting interpretations, and could be recited with approval by members of many parties. And finally, even if the poet’s message was unequivocal, it is by no means certain that this message molded the reader; it was just as likely that the reader sought the message he wanted and might have in any event found elsewhere, on nonpoetic grounds. Were not poets more mirror than cause?

It is a hard question to answer, but this much is evident: both before the Weimar Republic and during it, poetry exercised a peculiar power over the German imagination, Certainly the Germans were not alone in worshipping poets, as they were not alone in forming powerful coteries held together by bonds of conviction or homosexual love; the affairs of the Bloomsbury circle suggest that when it came to sexual eccentricities among influential young men, graduates from Oxbridge were far more active, and far more secretive, than the George circle. But the secretiveness of the English, their outward conventionality, was at least in part their salvation; precisely because they were private, they influenced the public less – at least in this area of their activity – than the ostentatious cultists in Germany.

Yet, as the memoirs, heavily laden with testimony, show over and over again, the men of Weimar were particularly susceptible to poetry….

New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1968, pp. 65-66.

[Procedural point, independent of any substantive issue: nobody writing like this can graduate today.]

Now, metaphysics has always been the ape of mathematics. Geometry suggested the idea of a demonstrative system of absolutely certain philosophical principles; and the ideas of the metaphysicians have at all times been in large part drawn from mathematics. The metaphysical axioms are imitations of the geometrical axioms; and now that the latter have been thrown overboard, without doubt the former will be sent after them. It is evident, for instance, that we can have no reason to think that every phenomenon in all its minutest details is precisely determined by law…

Had I more space, I now ought to show how important for philosophy is the mathematical concept of continuity. Most of most is true in Hegel is a darkling glimmer of a concept which the mathematicians had long before made pretty clear, and which recent researches have still further illustrated.

Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume I (1867-1893) (Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel eds.), Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 296.

The Aristocratic Humanist

For the humanist was an aristocrat. If the intellectual of the Middle Ages ultimately betrayed his vocation of working scientifically, he did so by denying his own nature. From the start the humanist took the mind, genius, as his symbol, even when he grew pale poring over texts or when his eloquence smelled of the lamp. He wrote for the members of the club. When Erasmus published the Adagia his friends told him “You are revealing our mysteries!”

Indeed, the environment in which the humanist was born was quite different from the feverish urban workplace, open to all, once concerned with making progress on all fronts in all forms of technology, and with having them tie into a common economy – the environment where the medieval intellectual had been formed.

The humanist’s milieu was that of the group, of the closed Academy and, when true humanism conquered Paris, it was not taught at the university, but in that elite institution, the Collège des Lecteurs Royaux, the future Collège de france.

His milieu was the prince’s court….  (161-162)

The prince reserved civil matters for himself. The humanists served him often, but always left the guidance of society to him. They worked in silence. Moreoever, they hid the fact that they worked. They praised leisure, free time spent with belles-lettres, the otium of ancient aristocracy. “Do not be ashamed of this illustrious and glorious leisure in which the great minds have always taken pleasure,” wrote Nicholas of Clémanges to Jean de Montreuil. (163)

The Return to the Countryside

Where better to find that distinguished and studious leisure than in the country? The movement which took the intellectual from the cities and returned him to the country was now complete. Here, too, the agreement between economic and social evolution became perfect. The wealthy bourgeois and princes invested their capital in land, had villas or palaces built, either modest or luxurious depending on their means. The neo-Platonic Academy of Florence met in the Medicis’ villa at Caregg…. (163-164)

The Break between Knowledge and Teaching

Thus the humanist abandoned one of the primary tasks of the intellectual, which was to have contact with the masses, to connect their knowledge with teaching. Undoubtedly the Renaissance ultimately brought to humanity the harvest of an arrogant and solitary work. Its knowledge, its ideas, and its masterpieces ultimately fed human progress. But it was first of all a withdrawal, a recoiling. The printing press perhaps first favored – before spreading written culture everywhere – a shrinking of the diffusion of thought. Those who knew how to read were a small favored elite, and were happy that way. Others were no longer fed on crumbs from the scholasticism which had been provided them by the preachers and “artists” of the Middle Ages, all of whom were trained by the university. It was perhaps necessary to await the Counter-Reformation for an art to appear which – in a perhaps questionable form, but one full of didactic intentions and an enthusiasm for propogating new ideas – would seek to have the people participate in cultural affairs.

There is nothing more striking than the contrast between images which show the intellectual in the Middle Ages and the humanist at work. The former is a professor, caught up in his teaching, surrounded by students, besieged by benches, where his audience is pressing in. The other is a solitary scholar, in his calm chamber, at ease in the midst of the private, luxurious room where his thoughts can move freely about. The former shows the tumult of schools, the dust of classrooms, the collective worker’s indifference to beauty,

            The latter shows all is order and beauty

            Luxury, calm, and pleasure. (165-166)

Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuels au Moyen Age (trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan), Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993.

Thomas de Quincy, “Suspiria de Profundis,” in Thomas de Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, Barry Milligan ed. (London: Penguin, 2003).

I wish not to recall the circumstances of that time, when my agony was at its height, and hers in another sense was approaching. Enough to say – that all was soon over; and the morning of that day had last arrived which looked down upon her innocent face, sleeping the sleep from which there is no awaking, and upon me sorrowing the sorrow for which there is no consolation. (106)

Even a little child has a dread, whispering consciousness, that if he should be summoned to travel into God’s presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. (118)

E. M. Forster

They [Vashti and Kuno] wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seem heavenly at first, shot with the colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long it was a garment and no more, so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body – it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend – glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.

The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 195-196.

Chapter XIV

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling days during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,” or, “I am horrified,” we are insincere. “As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror” – it’s no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.

Harvest Book (Harcourt) Ed., 1984, pp. 146 

24 Tragedy Is Not Our Business

What is at issue today is whether we have grown too conscious and too clever for comedy’s burst of good will. In every age but this the creators of our great fictions have regularly accorded us happy endings to stand beside those others that evoke our terror and our pity. Happy endings still exist, of course. But they have los their ancient legitimacy.... They awaken an automatic distrust…. And so for the first time since the beginning of our literature there is no major artistic mode to affirm the experience of comedy: healing, restoration, winning through…. It is a grand claim we make when we reject happy endings: that we are very special, that whatever songs previous ages could sing, in our terrible country all success is shallow or illusory, all prosperity a fairy-tale; that the only responses to our world which can command adult assent are compulsive ironies and cries of pain; that the world which seems to lie before us like a world of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath, in short, really neither joy nor love nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, and we are hear on a darkling plain waiting for Godot.

Clara Park, The Siege, quoted on pp. 306.