Category: Companion Piece

By Justin Willson

This is a companion piece to the author’s article, “A Meadow that Lifts the Soul: Originality as Anthologizing in the Byzantine Church Interior,” published in the January 2020 issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas (vol. 81.1).

Literary critics have a knack for wielding double standards — and nowhere more so than in the judgment of originality. In the Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye asserts that “any serious study of literature soon shows that the real difference between the original and the imitative poet is simply that the former is more profoundly imitative” (97). Far from implying an absence of imitation, originality, Frye believes, emerges from its necessity: “The remark of Mr. Eliot that a good poet is more likely to steal than to imitate affords a more balanced view of convention.” Stealing — recycling the style, voice and moves of poets one admires and envies — is the trademark of the good poet. If he can get away with it, and actually create something new in the process, he (and it is often ‘he’ for these critics) may qualify as  what Harold Bloom calls the “strong” poet. For Bloom, who died just this past October (2019), the poet is always wresting his creative power from the titans of the literary canon. Or to put the point in Frye’s more subdued, textually-oriented language: “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels” (97).

None of this will surprise readers of modernist literature. James Joyce and Ezra Pound, to take but two of the most obvious examples, filled their writings with echoes, citations and parodies, to an extent that blurs the line between imitative use (or reuse) and novelty. This, in the eyes of many critics, was exactly the point. But whereas history has looked with (mostly) favorable eyes on this borrowing and rearranging — the fecund hallmark of the 20th century avant-garde (think, for instance, of Marcel Duchamp’s “found” objects, among them the urinal he ironically christened “Fountain”) — the same cannot be said of medieval art. That is to say, curiously, in the case of medieval art and literature, critics have often hastily dismissed the artistic impulse to revisit and reuse. Works of art that imitate famous models are looked upon as rote recycling, and literary texts that borrow from earlier authors are scorned as mindless copycat.

To be sure, the stakes of copying were vastly higher in a deeply Christian age than they were in post-WWI Europe and America: in medieval Europe, tradition, by and large, was upheld on the evidence of divine revelation, and the artist or intellectual who ventured too far from what the Church taught could be condemned as a heretic. Self-expression, individuality, and originality were not necessarily viewed as the goal of art and life, as they often are today. But they also weren’t entirely foreign to the medieval intellectual. Indeed, a certain kind of originality thrived, and in my contribution to JHI I look at how medieval writers used the metaphor of the anthology as an emblem of their distinctive conception of what it meant to be original.

The word “anthology” comes from two Greek roots: anthos and legein which, together, mean “to gather flowers,” and an anthologia is a bouquet or a garland. The flowers in this metaphor are images or passages from literary works. In typical usage, the English word anthology connotes a book that is just a compilation, which no one would mistake for a work that is a unique literary text. But medieval literature points to the deeper sense of originality that Frye articulates. The anthology — the very embodiment of the derivative — is an emblem of a deeply learned, historically situated originality. Literary culture is borrowed from the past. Every poem is made, more or less, out of earlier poems. Every poet is inevitably indebted to an earlier poet — a dependency that Bloom famously characterized as the “anxiety of influence” which a strong poet tries to overcome. In the original work of art, Frye would say, one expects to find citations and echoes of earlier artworks. Past literature colors new literature through and through. This renders anthologizing a positively creative cultural practice, giving the term a new valence.

Seen this way, the literary and visual canons of art are an ever-evolving anthology, and medieval cultural productions are no exception to this general rule. Medieval writers and visual artists were adept at copying, which is to say they were highly original and inventive. Medieval authors and artists preyed on their predecessors, a pillaging that constituted the lifeline of their tradition. Models, motifs, and turns of phrase borrowed from the past reflected not stagnancy but movement and display. Creativity provided audiences with an opportunity to reappraise the tradition,  presupposing an ability to discern a nuanced recasting of the familiar. Medieval literature and visual art, in other words, could be read as one great ode in praise of copying, to quote a recent title. Cutting and pasting — which the medieval author cherished as much as the modernist — is the signature of a self-reflective art rather than a mark of deficiency.

In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophers abandoned this very medieval (and indeed very classical) way of looking at and appreciating the citational richness of works of literature and visual art. The influential French philosopher Montesquieu castigates les compilateurs,who, in his view, are no better than printers arranging letter blocks on a blank page, or erratic librarians creating new patterns by reshuffling books on a shelf. Like the librarian or the printer, the anthologist, in Montesquieu’s elitist conception, works only with her hands rather than with her mind. But for much of the medieval period the mind that invents and the hand that executes were far less easily divorced than Montesquieu’s dualism implies. Seen in hindsight, it is not the view of Enlightenment philosophers like Montesquieu but that of medieval authors that bears an affinity with our post-modern stance towards the artist. The Byzantine authors I survey: Procopius (6th century), John of Damascus (8th century), and Leo the Wise (9th century) metaphorically describe the artist as an anthologist who taps into the creative potential of a cultural totality that transcends individuality.

The view of the artist as a conduit or channel of a will that collectively exceeds individual agency and subjectivity is held by many artists today. For instance, in The Annotated Reader (2018), Ryan Gander asked a variety of persons (not just artists) to annotate a short passage from any text that had impacted them. Binding their submissions together, Gander made an anthology, a handbook penned by many hands. Leaves that bore the mark of a bygone act of consumption, the Reader could make no claim to be untouched or new to the market. Rather, its value lay precisely in being a rebinding of twice and thrice-told words, a situation that bears relevance for the thick understanding of tradition and reuse that presided over much of art-making in medieval times.

The impulse to anthologize — an ecologically friendly kind of creativity, if you will — is a legacy of the Middle Ages that lives on in postmodernity. If it doesn’t map on to the crystalline seventeenth-century Enlightenment ideals of total originality, anthologizing has an uncanny resonance with the messier, empirically derived insights of nineteenth-century Darwin:  survival of the fittest, most imitable text is the least common denominator of a viable canon. Traces always remain of  what has come before, and, just as in nature, nothing comes from nothing. This medieval view of originality may be able to help us think through the problems that face us today, above all our obsession with art—and other commodities, cultural and industrial—that seems to have been conceived ex nihilo. The myth of total originality is a symptom of a broader obsession with the property, and unrecycled novelty, that has had serious environmental repercussions. Historicizing originality robs the commodity of its deceptive claim to have come from nowhere.

Justin Willson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art & Archaeology at Princeton University where he works on Byzantine and Slavic art and aesthetics. His publications have appeared in Res: Anthropology & Aesthetics and Studies in Iconography.

By Daniel Weidner

This is a companion piece to Daniel Weidner’s recent article in the Journal of the History of Ideas, ‘The History of Dogma and the Story of Modernity: The Modern Age as the “Second Overcoming of Gnosticism”.

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Like identical twins, philosophy and history seem to be tied together in an uneasy way. On one hand, philosophy still tries to a large extent to engage with the history of philosophy. There are not many other branches of knowledge that would continually refer back to their own “classics”. On the other hand, quite a few of these classics authors did not hold history in high esteem. Aristotle, as is well known, preferred even drama to history because the latter simply concerns issues that are contingent. The marriage between history and philosophy quite often results in monsters in the form of Hegelian philosophies of history: great narratives that are still among the main targets of critical thought, probably because they are all too easy to debunk.

If we head for a more difficult task, or simply want to get deeper in the conundrum, we might turn to the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg. Blumenberg’s work mostly comprises voluminous books which trace, with utmost erudition, a certain idea or motif – the idea of myth, the metaphor of ‘reading’ the world, the motif of the exit from the cave – from antiquity to the present. Once, when accused of being a historicist, Blumenberg stated that he would accept this title with pride. Occasionally, he described his undertaking as a “phenomenology of history” – not an easy task since phenomenology, here understood in the Husserlian sense, belongs to those philosophical disciplines that are not particularly friendly with history. Precisely these frictions, however, seemsto have allowed Blumenberg to be particularly conscious about the problem of a history of philosophy as distinct from a philosophy of history and to develop creative approaches and detours.

One of these approaches seem to be very simple but proves most efficient. What if we do not focus on the very question what is history as a whole? or the ‘essence’ of history’s major epochs, but more modestly on the minor changes and transitions? Even though we might not know what antiquity is, we could be able to describe what happens when it comes to an end. Blumenberg argued in a review article from 1958 that this is where the more interesting historical research ends up:

“If Hellenism and late antiquity, ‘the autumn of the middle ages’ and the dawn of the modern ages have become attractive recently, the big question of what ‘history’ is stands silently in the background. What is an ‘epoch’? What is the structure of ‘epochal change’? How is the incongruence of testimonies and events to be understood and methodologically handled? These are the very detailed questions that seem to be necessary to discuss and transform the problem of History from its daunting massiveness into something graspable.”[1]

What we observe in these transitions is neither continuity nor clear-cut rupture, rather something in-between, a certain overlapping where some issues, questions, and concepts are still in place but begin to change their meaning or – as Blumenberg tries to figure it – where answers might be found even if the questions to which they once belonged are no longer relevant. It is not an univocal change, but rather a threshold situation in which it is possible to look into both directions, to understand the new from the perspective of the old and vice versa. Later, in his magisterial book on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg set up a sort of differential test analyzing the two metaphysical conceptions of Nicolas Cusanus and Giordano Bruno. Despite the fact that the two ideas are very similar and the authors even, at times, make identical statements, Blumenberg argues that on closer inspection they point in different directions: one to a medieval horizon of thought and the other towards a modern understanding of the world.

It is not by chance that this epochal threshold concerns the emergence of what Blumenberg calls “the Modern Age” (“die Neuzeit”, literally “the New Age”). Another fruitful approach to the question of history is to ask more specifically about the history of this Modern age. For this history is different from previous ones because the modern age understands itself as a new beginning that breaks with its past. Does this claim not contradict the very project of a history of this claim? That is at least the suspicion in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, where Blumenberg vigorously and broadly criticizes the so called theories of ‘secularization.’ Those theories argued that essential modern ideas and attitudes are nothing but transformed Christian heritage, e.g. when Max Weber claims that the capitalist work ethos emerged out of the Puritan search of salvation, or when Karl Löwith describes the modern philosophies of history as a mere continuation of Christian theologies of salvation. If that were true, Blumenberg argues, the self-declared aim of modernity to be autonomous or to be the beginning of something truly new would be an illusion.

Both approaches – the discussion of the epochal threshold and the discussion of the genealogy of modernity – do not only put forward interesting perspectives on the problem of history, they also relate to bodies of knowledge other than those usually discussed in relation to history and theory. In relation to late antiquity, Blumenberg refers to Hans Jonas and Rudolf Bultmann, among others, who developed complex models for how Paganism, Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism interact and interfere. These researchers are anything but positivists, rather they are certainly major contributors to the hermeneutic discussion of the 1950s and beyond. Their history is a history of ideas more than a history of facts: it belongs the history of dogma and the history of religion. This is a very important but oddly overlooked field, for historical theology was among the most admired disciplines of the German university but has rarely been taken into account in more general discussions of the history of knowledge. Later, in Work on Myth, Blumenberg would have interesting things to say about dogma that he described as a form of knowledge that aims less at answering questions than excluding and eliminating them. This opens up paths for a more comprehensive approach that would be aware of the different historicity of different forms of knowledge, as myth, metaphor, concept, or dogma. Arguably, every tradition would consist of the complex interplay and overlap of these different forms of knowledge and expression.

In the Legitimacy, Blumenberg refers to the history of dogma to develop not only his own idea of historical change, but also his own account of early Christianity. This in turn also allows him to re-narrate the history of the modern age. Ironically, this work not only refutes the erroneous genealogies that claim modernity to be the secularization of Christianity but replaces it by a – no less complex, nor less far-reaching – story about modernity being the second overcoming of Gnosticism.  It was, according to Blumenberg, not the Christian eschatology that brought about modern philosophy of history, as Löwith did argue. Rather, Christian eschatology collapsed in the early phase of Christianity when the expected second coming of Christ was delayed, a breakdown that motivated the formation of Christian Dogma. This dogma than entailed the Gnostic assault on it, an assault that in turn was only overcome by the reevaluation of the world, worldly knowledge, and curiosity that Blumenberg claims to be characteristic of the modern age. As Löwith himself remarked in his review of the Legitimacy, we as readers might ask in the end: “why all this effort of precise distinction, broad historical erudition, and polemical invective against the scheme of Secularization if the critique of this illegitimate category in the end is so close with what it criticizes?”[2]

The discussion on secularization was a very German one, thus Blumenberg’s work, though translated early, was not broadly received internationally. Nor did his defense of the Modern Age fit well into the discussion on Postmodernism. Even today, the growing discussion on Secularism and Secularization seems to rest on premises so different from Blumenberg’s that it is all but easy to connect him to it. Still, his thinking allows us to complicate and also criticize the genealogies of modernity that are being discussed–from Jean Luc Nancy’s “deconstruction of Christianity” via Charles Taylor’s story of the emergence of a secular age to Jan Assman’s recent engagement with the “axial Age”. Moreover, Blumenberg’s meticulous histories of problems highlight that it does make a difference to reflect on what we actually do when we historicize properly and try to represent the subtleties of historical change. The history of philosophy – and maybe also the philosophy of history – might be richer if we were less concerned with the great answers or grand narratives than with the right questions that allow us to work out the transitions, thresholds, and traditions mentioned.

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[1] Hans Blumenberg: Epochenschwelle und Rezeption, in: Philosophische Rundschau 6 (1958), 94-120, here 94-95.

[2] Karl Löwith: Review of Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, in: Philosophische Rundschau 15/3 (1968), 195-201, here 200.

By Nicholas Germana

Professor Germana’s essay “The Creuzerstreit and Hegel’s Philosophy of History” is in the most recent Journal of the History of Ideas.

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In his July 2002 article in JHI, on “Greek Origins and Organic Metaphors: Ideals of Cultural Autonomy in Neohumanist Germany from Winckelmann to Curtius,” Brian Vick effectively demonstrates the importance of the debate over Greek origins in German scholarship in the late 18th century.  The article sheds light on the intensity of the dispute between German classicists and up-and-coming Sprachwissenschaftler who placed increasing importance on the historical precedence and significance of Oriental languages, especially Sanskrit.  The problem for classicists came from mounting evidence that Sanskrit was an older relative of more modern European languages, including Greek, and some thinkers (most notably Herder and Friedrich Schlegel) proclaimed it to be the mother-tongue, the Ursprache of all human languages.  Friedrich Creuzer built on the work of these Sprachwissenschaftler (and that of his Heidelberg colleague Joseph Görres), claiming that the Oriental heritage of Greek culture included not just the language but also the central mythological and religious content of Greek culture (and, by implication, German culture as well).

Hegel was among the thinkers who most vehemently rejected Romantic claims about the historical significance of Oriental cultures, an opposition that has been well-documented at this point.  The scholarship of Sir William Jones and other (primarily English) philologists forced Hegel to accept the claims of historical priority, however reluctantly. Unlike the Romantics, however, Hegel rejected the idea that Sanskrit’s historical precedence conferred upon it any special status or gave it any right to share in the glorious efflorescence of Greek culture.  The clearly gendered language that Hegel uses to describe India (invariably feminine) and Greece (masculine in unmistakably Winckelmannian terms) is striking. Following what had become a convention of the day, he associates Indian culture with flowers, and in his lectures on the philosophy of history he likens the seductive charm of this “Flower-life” to the beauty of women following childbirth or during the magical transportations of dreamful sleep.

Hegel’s formulation here appears straight-forwardly Orientalist in the Saidian sense – the Orient is sexualized in terms that subject it to the male gaze, the categories of domineering masculine reason, and subjugation to European power.  A closer look, however, reveals something more interesting about the place and significance of these ideas in Hegel’s system. Hegel’s statement in the Philosophy of Right (1821) that men are like animals while women correspond to plants suggests that his claims about the femininity of Indian culture constituted more than the chauvinism of Hegel’s day, but were, in fact, of systematic importance (§168A).  Hegel’s ideas about human nature and biology are most thoroughly articulated in the Philosophy of Nature (first edition, 1818), and it is in this work that Hegel expounds upon the biological basis of the presumed differences between men sexes.  Women’s biology, for Hegel, is a product of their essential nature, a gendered embodiment of Spirit (this is the vitalism of his Naturphilosophie). While men are active and objectified in the world through their anatomy, women are passive and their being is directed inward toward the unarticulated immediacy of feeling.  While women find the realization of their essential nature in the family, men use the family as the spiritual foundation from which they can venture forth into the world (this relationship forms the core of Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist critique of modern society in The Second Sex).  The feminine is the basis of historical development and the achievement of male rational autonomy, but remains static and is excluded from this development.

Hegel’s thinking about the essential differences between the sexes and between human cultures was hardly without precedent.  It can clearly be traced back to Kant’s account of the teleological development of human cultures and the historical achievement of rational autonomy (Germana 2017).  Jon Stewart’s article, “Hegel, Creuzer, and the Rise of Orientalism” (Owl of Minerva, Nos. 1-2, 2013-2014) cautions, however, that this narrative is not so simple as it might appear.  Stewart’s interest is primarily in Hegel’s philosophy of religion, and he rightly points out that Hegel’s endorsement of Creuzer’s theories regarding the transmission of mythological and religious symbols from India to Greece brings Indian thought into the rich history of the development of Spirit in human cultures, rather than setting it aside as ahistorical and insignificant.  He is also right to point out that Hegel was one of the most vocal advocates of the need for modern Europeans to engage in deeper and more meaningful study of the belief systems of the ancient Orient. For the historian of ideas, however, a powerful question remains: How could Hegel embrace Friedrich Creuzer without embracing the Catholic romantic orientalism of Friedrich Schlegel (about whom Hegel’s comments are unequivocally negative)?

An answer to this question can be found in the gendered language of Hegel’s descriptions of Indian and Greek cultures.  There is a hitherto unrecognized, but critical difference between Creuzer’s and Hegel’s accounts – the Neoplatonism of the former, and the Aristotelianism of the latter.  Hegel’s thoroughly Aristotelian understanding of the teleological, organic development of Spirit through human cultures was able to make use of Creuzer’s model of historical development to arrive at very different conclusions.  In the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel dismisses “conventional opinion” that gets caught up in the question of which philosophical system is “right” and which is “wrong,” arguing instead that the “diversity of philosophical systems” present “the progressive unfolding of truth” (§ 2).  From this perspective, Oriental religious ideas also have the “instinct of reason” as their basis, and they have a critical role to play in the teleological development of Spirit toward complete realization and “absolute knowing.” In the Phenomenology, Hegel reverts time and again to organic metaphors to describe the principle underlying this development.  Two of the most famous of these metaphors are, in fact, taken directly from Aristotle – the bud that “disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom” (§2, from On the Generation of Animals) and the embryo that contains the full potential of humanity, but which can only make “itself into what it is in itself” through the cultivation of reason (§21, from On the Soul).

In my JHI article, I draw out the implications of Hegel’s Aristotelianism, arguing that in line with Aristotelian views on reproduction India provides the inert material, to which the Greeks contribute the efficient cause that actualizes being and awakens its final cause, the development of Spirit toward complete self-realization in human freedom.  Unlike Creuzer, who granted India a privileged status as the progenitor of later world religions, Hegel posited a static subordinate stage of world-historical development whose real significance was limited to its “merely material” contribution to the growth of Spirit in the West.

This conclusion leads in a surprising new direction – toward a reevaluation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, its relation to his philosophy of history, and its place within his system as a whole.  Of all of his major works (published in his lifetime and after), the Philosophy of Nature is seen as the most problematic; as Terry Pinkard notes, the work “fell into complete disrepute immediately after his death and has rarely been looked at since by anybody other than dedicated Hegel scholars” (2000, 562-63).  Hegel’s views on science – his opposition to Newtonianism and his organic vitalism – have not stood the test of time in anything like the way that his ideas on society, history, morality, and culture have. These ideas have lived on and been fruitfully developed by other thinkers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, in contrast, is an end rather than a beginning in European thought.

However, Hegel’s Naturphilosophie may actually provide a key to the development of his philosophy of history.  Like inorganic and organic being, human cultures present the objectification and actualization of Spirit as it is “concretely instantiated,” to use Allison Stone’s apt description from Petrified Intelligence (SUNY Press, 2005, xiii). While other contemporary thinkers, such as Herder and Schelling, used floral metaphors to describe Indian culture, what if Hegel meant it not metaphorically but literally? If we map the philosophy of history over the Philosophy of Nature with Indian culture in the place of “The Plant Nature” (§§343-349), what do we find?  Moving “backwards” through less-developed “ontological structures” (again borrowing from Stone, xiii), we find ourselves in the realm that corresponds to Africa, on the one hand, and inorganic being on the other.  (China marks a special case, and Hegel’s thinking on China developed after the narrative structure of the philosophy of history was in place.) Africa, in Hegel’s system, is characterized by totemism and fetishism that never really manage to escape the bonds of merely material existence.  Africa is essentially inert.

Moving forward into “The Animal Organism,” we find Egypt.  In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel makes much of the Egyptian deification of animals, which he holds to be a considerable progression over the worship of inanimate celestial bodies.  Animal being possesses the spark of vitality and subjectivity that is only hinted at in plant life. In a remarkable passage in the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel tarries over the ideas embodied in the Sphinx, with its human head emerging from an animal body.  Finally, in the Greeks we possess human nature and in Hegel’s system we are led to the third volume of the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Mind.

There is certainly no precise correspondence between the stages of development articulated in the Philosophy of Nature and the lectures on the philosophy of history.  Hegel’s thought developed considerably as he delivered and refined his various lecture series throughout the 1820s, as well as the revisions he made to the Encyclopedia just before his death.  There is, however, enough of a correspondence to suggest a compelling research project.  Allison Stone and Sally Sedgewick (“Remarks on history, contingency, and necessity in Hegel’s Science of Logic,” in Hegel on Philosophy in History, Cambridge University Press, 2019) have raised compellingly similar questions about how far we should read necessity into Hegel’s philosophy of nature and philosophy of history, respectively.  We might most profitably engage these questions by bringing the inquiries together.

Nicholas A. Germana is a Professor of History at Keene State College in New Hampshire.  His second book, The Anxiety of Autonomy and the Aesthetics of German Orientalism, was published by Camden House in 2017.  He is currently working on a study of the Newtonian influence on Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.

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