tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post1863826659665941803..comments2024-03-07T12:57:35.296-05:00Comments on Varieties of Unreligious Experience: Rodriguez on GreatnessConrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-51754650806912872052008-10-03T19:47:00.000-04:002008-10-03T19:47:00.000-04:00Conrad, a small point: Giotto and Brunelleschi cre...Conrad, a small point: Giotto and Brunelleschi created masterworks, and you can't blame the masterworks if they're used to represent the early Renaissance. I can't see how these people are different from their literary contemporaries.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-41246800536917085662008-10-02T15:36:00.000-04:002008-10-02T15:36:00.000-04:00Conrad, I suppose the fact that I'm doing graduate...Conrad, I suppose the fact that I'm doing graduate work in German literature now somewhat innoculates me from the death of the author - how do you say that about Kafka or Benjamin?<BR/><BR/>Maybe the germanists are just behind the anglos on this front. But it seems pretty gemuetlich to me right now. <BR/><BR/>Greg, I am intrigued by this ahistorical notion of greatness. My feeing is that the greatness we're all kind of talking about is a product of Romanticism, and that Homer and Dante weren't great in the way we think of them until the late 18th Century, despite the use of the term "greatness". <BR/><BR/>And although I grant that those interpretive structures have a bearing, Gadamer's position sounds curiously like sense data to me. Can't we have a little unmediated experience?<BR/><BR/>I tend to see concepts as something that are formed in, and persist through, time. They are real, but we made them, but I'm not sure if our experience of them is mediated in the way you describe. But it's something I will need to think about!Andrew W.https://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-70362123564973020432008-10-01T22:49:00.000-04:002008-10-01T22:49:00.000-04:00Well, for Gadamer, very broadly speaking, our inte...Well, for Gadamer, very broadly speaking, our interpretations are directly shaped by the tradition to which we are heirs. This of course means that our interpretation of any work is founded in some sense on the history of the interpretation of that work. (Just as a production of a play does not take place in a vacuum, as a direct reflection of that play's text, but rather as a "coming to terms" with the prior history of that play's performance).<BR/><BR/>We therefore cannot set apart, say, the Iliad, or Hamlet, as a pure and ahistorical object. Our understanding of the Iliad takes place only within our awareness of the Iliad's place within the history of poetry (the history of culture, the history of Europe, etc.). So any greatness we find in these texts is inseparable from their place in history.<BR/><BR/>As a Romantic concept, on the other hand (according to Gadamer's view), greatness is ahistorical. So whatever it could have meant to them means something totally different to us. This is not to imply that the Romantics had discovered a magical method for interpreting texts without being bound by tradition--it's simply that their conceptualization did not include this circumstance.<BR/><BR/>Of course, the Romantic view is still prevalent, and it's true that lots of things would be unintelligible without it. But my tentative claim is that the greatness you're looking for only happens to share the name with the Romantic concept and is in fact something entirely different--and if it was truly the Romantic concept you were looking for, you'd never find it. Maybe the fact that you place great works at the beginning of movements is a way of reconciling the two definitions, but I don't think national literatures are really a way out of the problem posed by the fact that history is really continuous through and through.Greg Afinogenovhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13529073439919307693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-17648434947573571352008-10-01T19:54:00.000-04:002008-10-01T19:54:00.000-04:00Andrew, perhaps you are right, that I am leaning t...Andrew, perhaps you are right, that I am leaning towards a greatness of persons, not works. (Which of course would make me most Romantic of all.) It is something I've wondered about before, and want to resist, but perhaps only because contemporary orthodoxy denies the author everything (in literary / intellectual circles, if not in political). Perhaps I would like to return to a heroic conception of the author. I'm not sure.<BR/><BR/>Greg: Yes, I do insist on keeping apart the great and the lauded: but the notion of 'lauded', still, is unintelligible without that of 'great'. (This does not seem sophistical to me at the moment, but perhaps it is.) I also think that the notion of greatness is probably flexible enough to allow particular differences within a broader agreement.<BR/><BR/>I'm generally sympathetic to Gadamer's project, although I am not familiar with the nuances of his thought. So I am not fully sure how you defend this point:<BR/><BR/>"But for us, even the non-Gadamerians among us, greatness is experienced in terms of art history, in movements and contexts, not simply as the unfettered flight of the creative genius."Conrad H. Rothhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-405423260605283702008-09-30T19:10:00.000-04:002008-09-30T19:10:00.000-04:00I thought this deserved more than a comment.I thought this deserved <A HREF="http://ruricolist.blogspot.com/2008/09/at-vunex.html" REL="nofollow">more than a comment</A>.Paul M. Rodriguezhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00925737399903171837noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-89232259517405225902008-09-30T11:33:00.000-04:002008-09-30T11:33:00.000-04:00Conrad, it strikes me that, in discussing greatnes...Conrad, it strikes me that, in discussing greatness, you lean toward it as a category inhabited by men and women, rather than their works. <BR/><BR/>I think there is something there. Goethe, to me, <I>to anyone</I> (I step out onto the ledge), is undisputably great. But Reineke Fuchs? The Xenien? Tasso? At the same time, can I say that greatness lies within them?<BR/><BR/>I think this also lines up with your thoughts on Romanticism and the heroic. <BR/><BR/>Looking at it this way may also get us out of the tangle of the canon, without diminishing Greg's comments. <BR/><BR/>And of course, this is not to say that works can only be good and not great, but that this use seems to cause more controversy than anything.Andrew W.https://www.blogger.com/profile/00071098030747838202noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-18994444098770365442008-09-30T00:46:00.000-04:002008-09-30T00:46:00.000-04:00But surely the question of greatness as it has bee...But surely the question of greatness as it has been imputed to this or that work is a wholly separate one from that of whether a work is actually great? (You seem to acknowledge this when you distinguish between "great" and "lauded"). It seems to me that it's possible to have all kinds of conversations about greatness as long as you privately define "greatness" as "what everyone else thinks is so great." Even if you do not do so, the two concepts will never coincide anyway--somehow their concept of greatness includes Virginia Woolf, but yours does not.<BR/><BR/>The point about Romanticism is an interesting one--I've been reading Gadamer, and it intersects with some excellent points he makes about Romantic aestheticism. Essentially, the concept of a work created by genius (i.e. unmediated, pure, etc.) is unable to accommodate history (tradition) either in the production or the consumption of the work. To develop that further--because our understanding of greatness (both generally and specifically, i.e. "the greatness of <I>Childe Harold</I>") is a product of the tradition which forms our interpretive horizon, we're not actually able to experience the greatness of a work of art in the way the Romantics would have wanted us to. For them, greatness designated some kind of direct and immediate effect on the viewer (say), and a corresponding tie to the genius of the painter. But for us, even the non-Gadamerians among us, greatness is experienced in terms of art history, in movements and contexts, not simply as the unfettered flight of the creative genius. So I think that the reference to the Romantics contains a kind of equivocation that doesn't square with the rest of your account. Or does it?Greg Afinogenovhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13529073439919307693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-38445046498313937422008-09-29T22:32:00.000-04:002008-09-29T22:32:00.000-04:00Pedro, I think this response is sort of a clever n...Pedro, I think this response is sort of a clever naivety. "Homer", for instance, did not invent poetry (nobody could argue that), nor did "he" invent Greek or Indo-European epic. Nevertheless, the Homeric poems <EM>are</EM> the beginning of Greek literature, just as Dante is the beginning of Italian literature, despite Cavalcanti. The writers on the list create literatures, but not <EM>ex nihilo</EM>: there is always prior hyle to reshape.<BR/><BR/>Greg: I do agree that whoever wants to talk about greatness must be intensely sceptical or ambivalent towards the notion itself. But the problem has long existed at the nexus between modernist faith and postmodern faithlessness. (It goes back at least as far as Jacobi's "leap of faith", and attendant critiques.) <BR/><BR/>The value of discussing greatness stems from the fact that it is <EM>the</EM> Romantic <EM>a priori</EM>. On a historical level, much of culture and the way people think about culture (both casually and philosophically) is simply unintelligible without it; unless you want to articulate a radical nihilism, you have to accept some significance in the fact that people keep coming back to the Picassos and Shakespeares. Further, as we are now all instinctive Romantics (even those who have been de-programmed), the category of greatness is almost impossible to do away with. <BR/><BR/>I strongly disagree that the notion of 'greatness' necessarily 'promotes rigid orthodoxy', to a greater extent than any <EM>a priori</EM> notion. I also strongly deny that a great work is more deserving of analysis; if anything it is less deserving, or rather, less <EM>dependent on</EM> analysis.<BR/><BR/>Your last point is interesting. I certainly don't advocate any sort of surrender to canon here.Conrad H. Rothhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-51527563340299354522008-09-29T22:02:00.000-04:002008-09-29T22:02:00.000-04:00Actually, I'm not sure why it's useful or interest...Actually, I'm not sure why it's useful or interesting to talk about "greatness" at all. As an interpretive category, it dulls criticism and promotes rigid orthodoxy; as a judgment of taste, it is as subjective as anything else (remember Hume and his Addison before you object to this). Is a great work more deserving, somehow, of being relished or critically examined? I'd say that's putting the cart before the horse. <BR/><BR/>I don't mean that greatness is subjective in the sense that it's perfectly arbitrary. I mean that greatness is a description of the impact a book has had on your life. Or rather, of that particularly satisfying click a book makes when it fits right into the problematic you're trapped in when you read it. For instance, I consider John Le Carré's <I>The Naive and Sentimental Lover</I> a great book, even though hardly anyone would agree with me--it's just that it happened to come around right when I was struggling with the problem of aestheticism/bohemianism. It is useful to talk about books in this sense, because that allows you to extract from them a living tradition rather than a dead canon.<BR/><BR/>There's a particular sort of trope in discussions of the canon which has always troubled me. It goes like this: I hated my teachers and all those bad people who made me read the Great Books in school, so I was appropriately skeptical of the arbitrarily constructed canon; I resolved to judge literature with free and independent insight, unbound by aprioris of greatness; and I arrived at last at a list of Great Books identical to the first except--independent! There's a certain violence in this argument, a sort of vacuous uselessness and surrender, that I think probably ought to be avoided.Greg Afinogenovhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13529073439919307693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-35404600485137420322008-09-29T21:34:00.000-04:002008-09-29T21:34:00.000-04:00Hah! Sounds like the Dunciad was washed up on shor...Hah! Sounds like the Dunciad was washed up on shore along with all the telephones and pipes.<BR/><BR/>"The best choose one thing in place of all else, 'everlasting' glory among mortals; but the majority are glutted like cattle."<BR/>(Heraclitus)Greg Afinogenovhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13529073439919307693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-86009438424138091712008-09-29T21:16:00.000-04:002008-09-29T21:16:00.000-04:00Well, I won't indulge in cliches like quoting the ...Well, I won't indulge in cliches like quoting the Ecclesiastes, but a simple answer is that neither Homer, nor Vergil, Dante, Chaucer and Rabelais are at the beginning of anything at all. Homer most of all -- it has been argued that his difference to the rest of the Epic Cycle is evident (I for one wouldn't risk such a supposition), but that doesn't take away centuries of direct poetic practice, possibly quite directly linked to the ''Mycenaean' age, nor the (to me) even less tentative idea of oral epic poetry all the way back to PIE. And for the others mentioned, etc.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com