High Table

And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

Thanks to the internet, we can prove Socrates wrong. Yesterday Hayden White broke a ten-month silence on his own blog, and added the same text as a comment to my last post, taking me to task for taking him to task for his presentation to the Courtauld Institute last week. Naturally I am honoured—and I'm not being ironical—by his presence. And here is my reply:

*

Many thanks for taking the time to comment on my post; if I had known you would turn up in the audience, I would have minded my manners more. But I didn't, and must live with my own rudeness. Now, it would be disingenuous for me to take back what I have written, and so I will not; but I should observe at least that, in the heat of making a particular argument, one's overall perspective may be obscured. Indeed, a friend of sorts, who enjoys patronising me, has already commented, in light of this very confrontation, that 'Conrad is young and enjoys slashing attacks without much in the way of nuance'.

It is not true that my opinion of your work (or you) is 'totally hostile'. I was critical of your 'speech'—I would not call it a speech, which I think of as a more formal oration—because I thought it lacked substance. It was certainly entertaining, which immediately set it above the vast majority of lectures or papers one hears. I have no problem with garrulity or with America or Americanity, as my wife's response above should make clear. Nor did I expect you to be more, nor would I want you to be more, still less would I want every academic to be, 'donnish' or 'quietly authoritative'. Donnish and adventurous, quiet and aggressive—both have their place, as I myself more mutedly suggested in my comment above, that "there is [a] place for Whites as well as Murrays." And I did like Metahistory: I appreciated its grandeur, and moreover, opined here that 'much of it is convincing'. Suffice to say, it would not be hard to find a less sympathetic, more hostile opinion of your work than mine. If I had found your views uninteresting, I would not have come to hear you at the Courtauld.

I have no idea if the audience liked your speech; it is always difficult to get a measure of these things. One or two people I spoke to, certainly, seemed awed by your breadth of reference. I was also embarrassed—on your behalf—by the vacuous questions you were asked after you'd finished. But such, perhaps, are the inevitable dangers of these events. At any rate, whether the audience liked you or not makes no difference to the quality of your argument.

As for Momigliano, I have no doubt that you are infinitely more familiar with his work than am I; and that he was a perfect gentleman both in person and on the page. What I wrote, however, was that he penned not a 'devastating attack' on you, but a 'rather damning review' of your work, which is surely compatible with a politesse of tone, and even with intellectual respect; furthermore, my expression, unlike yours, does not commit me to agreeing with him. The subject of Momigliano's fascism, while interesting, is not remotely germane to the discussion at hand, nor to your speech. But when you write,

It is true that he believed that "Dov'e la rettorica, non c'e la storia," but if he really believed that he would also have had to deny that the whole of historiography written prior to the 19th century (from Herodotus to Gibbon) was real historiography!

you are merely contradicting yourself. Either he did not believe it, in which case it is not true that he did, or he did believe it, in which case, either he did deny that pre-Rankean historiography was genuine—and I don't believe he did—or he would have rejected your reasoning. Is it not possible to argue that, for a Gibbon—in whom, let us assume, there is both rettorica and storia—the extent to which a particular passage is rettorica is the extent to which it is not storia? In other words, although rhetoric and history may be mixed together in a work, even indistinguishably, like hydrogen and oxygen in water, might they at least be conceptually distinct? Why must we deal in absolutes?

My lecture at the Courtauld was in defense of returning historical research from its pretensions to the status of a "science" back to its service as branch of moral philosophy. . . on the grounds that a purely scientific or objective account of any set of facts can never be of any service to the "present."

This is a laudable intention, and one that Momigliano could only have sympathised with: his own project was described in exactly these terms by Murray and others last week. Murray himself, moreover, defended your philosophy of history as having moral value. But I am surprised that you allow even the possibility of a 'purely scientific or objective account of any set of facts'; and I am not convinced that your own defense adds much to what we have already, for instance from the myriad authorities you yourself quoted, from Nietzsche to Oakeshott. The statement that a set of facts 'can never be of any service to the present' seems little more than a historiographical reiteration of the age-old is-ought problem.

Furthermore, it is pointless to argue that 'The idea of the "practical past" would turn historical inquiry to the service of reformist movements in historical thinking', since it is these very species of historiography—the feminist, post-colonial, and so on—that have dominated academia for the past two decades or more. Who needs a defense of the status quo?

The real problem with the claims you made at the Courtauld is that they were not supported by any serious examination of actual cases. Which is not to say that they could not be so supported: it was a lazy speech because you expected your audience to take your word for it, ballasting your claims not with examples and evidence, but with references to previous philosophers who have said much the same, and devised terminology for the purpose. This is why the following assertion rings hollow:

I am all in favor of leaving professional historians to do their work of excavating facts about specific parts of the past, and giving out information about this past that can never imply anything about how this information might relate to the efforts of present individuals and groups to derive some "knowledge" about human self-making.

The impossibility that you describe is precisely what Murray achieved in his paper on Momigliano. Murray excavated facts about the eighteenth century, and in doing so could produce specific evidence of the flaws in his subject's efforts to comprehend man. Momigliano, he argued, misunderstood the process of history because he denied the intimate connections between 'fiction' and 'history'. Made baldly, this is is an uninteresting, or at least an unpersuasive statement. But made with reference to 'specific parts of the past', it begins to have authority and conviction. For a philosopher so fascinated with rhetoric, you must appreciate the value of winning the assent of your more critical listeners, and this requires not just names but facts, or if you would prefer, fact-like things.

I hope the discussion will not end here.

[Update: Discussion seems to have ended here.]

White and Momigliano

Hayden White spoke at the Courtauld on Wednesday night. Ken Clarke Lecture Theatre, a grand old room in pink, with white trim, like the inside of a wedding cake. A ghastly introduction from a fawning ex-student, not redeemed, but rather aggravated, by its kitschy, self-conscious irony. Hayden White is the king of irony. Then we clapped her off stage to make way for the master himself. White spoke for three quarters of an hour, with the utmost geniality, casually sweating references—Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Vico, Hugh Blair, Cicero, Dante, Winckelmann, Gombrich, Oakeshott, er, Toni Morrison, and so on, not to mention plenty of Hayden White. At the end of it, none of us was any the wiser. He was supposed to be talking about 'Novelesque Histories', apparently the (rather radical) notion that novels can be history too. I mean, just think of Walter Scott—Hegel thought him a great historian! After an hour he apologised for having no slides: this was, remember, at the Courtauld Institute, and he was lecturing to most of a roomful of art history graduates. Then he remembered he had some, and wheeled out some pictures of webs spun by spiders on drugs: an internet meme over a decade old. Still, it got the laughs. White said it was supposed to be a metaphor for the way literary history works, but it was a better metaphor for his own maundering, barely-coherent presentation. White, it seemed to me, was still trading off Metahistory, a book which had a few worthwhile ideas when he published it in 1973, even if it has been grossly overrated, then and since. Now he is a charming and erudite drunk*, still enjoying a meal of thirty years past, clean out of ideas.

*

None of which would have been worth writing a post on, if I hadn't attended a lecture today by Oswyn Murray, its subject ostensibly being '[Arnaldo] Momigliano and the Eighteenth Century'. Now, Momigliano wrote a rather damning review of Metahistory in his 1981 article, 'The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: on Hayden White's Tropes'. White's basic point had been—and still is, apparently—that historiography is a branch of rhetoric, and that the way one writes history is governed by the same sorts of rhetorical tropes as are found in oratory and fictional literature. Style becomes more important than truth: what could be more postmodern? Momigliano, the old-guard Warburg philologian, objected: what sense can we make of history if we forget that it centres on facts and problems? He wrote:

As the history of historiography is basically a study of individual historians, no student of the history of historiography does his work properly unless he is capable of telling me whether the historian or historians he has studied used the evidence in a satisfactory way.

Amélie Kuhrt, in the discussion after Murray's paper, described Momigliano's response to White as a moral distaste: the aim of historiography should be an ethical engagement with the problems of the past in relation to those of the present, not mere games with words and ideas, as White, the formalist, wanted to give us. Murray himself was more sympathetic to White. His paper, as charmingly delivered as White's, and with ten times the content, wanted to reconfigure Momigliano's map of narrative historiography in the Enlightenment. The old Italian, Murray observed, had paid too much attention to Gibbon, and scorned, to his own detriment, writers of literature: John Gast, for instance, or Walter Scott, who, as Murray pointed out, had been prized as a historian by Hegel and Carlyle. Novelists will tell you what colour trousers people wore, so to speak: and that was most important to the historian sniffing for clues.

What struck me was the contrast between White, American hero of the culture wars, and Murray, donnish, British, quietly authoritative. Both made the same point, or similar, and with the same example: the one rambling and blustering, bursting with comments on the Great Philosophers, the other excavating, methodically, a moment of history, letting the scholarship do its own talking, allowing the little to speak for the big. It has been a week to renew one's faith in the Murrays of the academic world.

* Not literally, of course. He may be, as well—but that is not what I meant.

[Update: Hayden White comments, here and on his own blog. Greg links. Steve sneers. Greg defends my honour. I respond to White. "Verstegan" defends my honour. Steve sneers again, with a dash of sanctimonious hypocrisy: my favourite kind! Thanks to all.]

Goal and Guides: How Christians Think

1. How Catholics Think.

A few months ago my wife, returning from the States, offered me a family heirloom. It is a 1945 catechism textbook from a Catholic high-school: Our Goal and Our Guides: Our Quest for Happiness. Most people who learn about the history of a subject will read the most significant, revolutionary or influential works on that subject: they will read Anselm and Aquinas, John Newman and Karl Barth. But if you want to understand a subject properly, it is important also to read the standard works, those that regurgitate material in simple and accessible form for the masses, so as to know the baseline against which the great works innovate. Our Goal is just such a work.

The book is full of marvelous diagrams in a vaguely moderne style, three of which I reproduce here. Catholic thought is essentially a diagrammatic thought: it is ordered in analogies and hierarchies, which lend themselves well to spatial representation. Before woodcuts and printing, which made actual diagrams easy to reproduce, Christian texts were full of verbal diagrams: elaborate correspondences between real and metaphysical objects, architecturally-structured theological summae, even the meditation-wheels of a Ramon Llull.

And with modern technology, these guys are unstoppable. Just look at that, above: that, truly, is wonderful. I don't think it bears much analysis. A few elements are doubtful. I can't identify the man and woman either side of Christ: I had thought of Mary and Joseph, since his attribute is a carpenter's square, but they are wearing monastic robes. I do not know the symbol at Christ's feet; nor the martyr-bishop with the book beside Agnes and Peter at the top right, if indeed he is anyone in particular. You have to admire that classic Catholic horror vacui: every spare cranny is crammed with symbol and ornament. The Church, like its late mentor Aristotle, has always occupied a plenum.

Here, on the tree of sin or death, superstition is on the second tier up, on the left, next to indifference. Superstition fascinates me, as nobody can agree on what it is. Our Goal never defines it; the closest it comes is to say, 'Other sins against religion are those which pay homage to a false god or which give false worship to the true God. Idolatry, divination, magic, and superstition are such sins.' On witchcraft, Our Goal has the audacity to suggest: 'Perhaps someone remembers the trouble this superstition caused in American history.' The book is not referring to the superstition that witches exist: it is referring to witchcraft itself (which 'endeavors to inflict harm with the aid of the devil') as a superstition.

On the next branch up, we find irreligion and presumption. At the top, apostasy, and despair. At the bottom are the rhizomatic deadly sins, symbolised by cute critters. It is all so charming!


Faith, says the Church, is necessary to salvation: it is one of the three Catholic virtues, along with Hope and Charity. The text of Our Goal distinguishes only between unconscious or 'habitual faith', infused into the soul at Baptism, and 'actual faith', consciously practiced by those with the power of reason: 'they are obliged to make acts of faith by which the infused capacity to believe is actually developed and strengthened'. The other divisions represented above are explained in Wilhelm's 1906 Manual of Catholic Theology:

A distinction is sometimes drawn between Explicit and Implicit Faith, founded upon the degree of distinctness with which the act of Faith apprehends its subject-matter; also between Formal Faith, which supposes an explicit knowledge of the motive and an express act of the will, and Virtual Faith, which is a habit infused or resulting from repeated acts of Formal Faith, and produces acts of Faith as it were instinctively without distinct consciousness of Formal Faith.

These three dichotomies (habitual / actual, formal / virtual, explicit / implicit) delineate much the same territories: but Our Goal is so committed to its rigorous hierarchies that it must order them sequentially. Theology is all the richer for it.

Cleverly, the Church stipulates that you must believe all articles of faith, even those you do not know. As an example, Our Goal offers Vatican I, 'man can come to a knowledge of the existence of God through the use of reason alone'. (The actual phrasing is: 'The same Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, / can be known / by the natural power of human reason.') In other words, we are to accept on faith the idea that faith is not necessary for the knowledge of God. A few pages later, Our Goal offers the reader a list of the catastrophic results that follow from faithlessness: the second is 'rationalism':

Many persons reject faith as a guide in religion and accept only what they can understand. This sin is called rationalism, a term which implies excessive reliance on reason. A person who believes only what he can understand is called a rationalist.

Compare Vatican I on the Reformation:

Thereupon there came into being and spread far and wide throughout the world that doctrine of rationalism or naturalism. . . Thus they would establish what they call the rule of simple reason or nature. The abandonment and rejection of the Christian religion, and the denial of God and his Christ, has plunged the minds of many into the abyss of pantheism, materialism and atheism, and the consequence is that they strive to destroy rational nature itself, to deny any criterion of what is right and just, and to overthrow the very foundations of human society.

This sort of nonsense was being refuted—or 'schooled', as I believe one has it on the interweb—back in the eighteenth century by Anthony Collins and Matthew Tindal, both chums of John Trenchard. But what interests me is the line that rationalists 'strive to destroy rational nature', presumably because it is irrational to be unfaithful towards Church tradition. You have to admire how Catholics could once get tangled up in these knots with a straight face.


2. How Protestants Think.

What I didn't tell you is that Mrs. Roth's granddaddy, the Reverend Bailey, who owned Our Goal and Our Guides, was no Catholic but a Southern Baptist, and a minister at that. Unshockingly, he weren't too keen on the book, and back in his day, if you weren't keen on a book, you didn't tell Amazon, you told the book. Which suits me. His views are manifest from the title-page onward:

Here the hands writing and the hand annotating are so at odds with each other that they cannot even agree on the grounds of theological dispute. And so the volume comes to serve as a scintillary document of religious worlds refusing to meet and interact. When Our Goal reaches the subject of Protestantism—the last of the heresies—Bailey is content to underline, whether amused or outraged:

Catholics should pray for the poor old Protestants? We should prove the truth of the Catholic faith 'by our lives as well as by our words'? The epistemological difficulties are great, as they are throughout the book. How are lives and words to demonstrate any proof to another? They can only demonstrate to those who believe already, those already primed to interpret those lives and those words as they must be interpreted. I would love to ask the authors of Our Goal what it would have taken to persuade them of the truth of Protestantism. Elsewhere, Luther gets lumped in with a Roman pagan and a Deist: a sorry lot!

Of course, at the heart of the dispute between Catholics and Protestants is the value accorded to institutional tradition. It was already the same with the Sadducees and Pharisees; and philosophical epigones still contest the significance of oral, esoteric or unpublished teachings, from Plato to Nietzsche. The Protestant Bailey is always asking: Who says? How do you know that? Does Scripture—the sole criterion of truth and falsehood—contain that doctrine? The Catholic, in turn, observes that it is no simple matter to read the Bible: the text is corrupt, the languages alien and idiomatic, and the sense frequently allegorical, obscure or ambiguous. And so we need to rely on a consensus, a tradition, as a guide to interpreting it. But Bailey will ask: Why your tradition? Why your guide? What criterion is to check and ground your assertions? The one wants liberty; the other assurance from without.



Of course neither side can convince the other; the two voices are locked in eternal battle, stilled and captured on the page, the one in printed Roman serifs and elegant diagrams, the other in oblique, exclamatory manuscript, the commentary pointed up by rough lines of the pen. Bailey is not fond of diagrams, of hierarchies, of systems—'This is a wicked system'. He attacks that distance in his very decision to annotate, uncowed by the serifs. It is a dangerous aggression, destined to pervert the young mind at the very moment it needs strength and discipline. Faith is a fragile shoot. So, too, is reason. It is a noble aggression, destined to liberate the young mind at the very moment it is in danger of submitting forever to a corrupt authority.

Constitutions and Distempers

In 1681, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet—tutor to the Dauphin and unofficial head of the French Catholic Church, stuck with playing advocatus diaboli to theological hotshots like Jean Claude and Leibniz—published his Discourse on Universal History, a triumphalist account of ancient and mediaeval Christian history, largely forgotten in the eighteenth century, but resurrected in the nineteenth as a masterpiece of literature for French collégiens to copy out and learn by heart. In Discourse 2.11, Bossuet deals with idolatry:

God knew man's mind and knew that it was not through reason that one could destroy an error which reason had not established. There are errors into which we fall when we reason, for man often gets tangled up because of his reasoning: but idolatry had come in by the opposite extreme, by stifling all reasoning, and by granting predominance to the senses, which sought to clothe everything with the qualities that strike the senses. Thus the Deity had become visible and vulgar.

Religious errors, says Bossuet, occur when we no longer listen to Reason, and devote ourselves instead to sensory experience, which is full of confusion. The true Christian distinguishes what he sees from what he knows: he realises that God cannot be grasped by the senses, but only by thought.

*

Bossuet was on the losing end of history; he and his ilk would soon concede Ohio and spend the next century on the back foot. This concession is popularly known as the 'Enlightenment'. One faction who stood to make big gains in Ohio were the Deists, and among them the English Whig, John Trenchard, whose Natural History of Superstition appeared in 1709, lambasting popery and enthusiasms. Having offered a litany of superstitions, Trenchard proposes his own account of religious error:

It must necessarily happen when the Organs of Sence (which are the Avenues and Doors to let in external Objects) are shut and locked up by Sleep, Distempers, or strong Prejudices, that the imaginations produced from inward Causes must reign without any Rival, for the Images within us striking strongly upon, and affecting the Brain, Spirits, or Organ, where the imaginative Faculty resides, and all Objects from without, being wholly, or in a great measure shut out and excluded, so as to give no information or assistance, we must unavoidably submit to an evidence which meets with no contradiction, and take things to be as they appear.

The problem for Trenchard is not sense experience but our own minds: where Bossuet saw corruption seeping in from outside, Trenchard sees the outside world as a necessary check to our fantasies.

Bossuet lived in the France of Descartes—Trenchard in the England of Locke. Descartes's Discourse on Method had spoken of man's lumière naturelle, given us by God to follow reason and distinguish truth from error. For Trenchard this is merely an 'Ignis Fatuus of the Mind, which the Visionaries in all Ages have called the Inward Light, and leads all that have followed it into Pools and Ditches'. Descartes is really no better than a mystic: his daimonion or 'voice of God' has become a secular lumière, but it is still claimed to be a divine gift. Of course it can provide no criterion of truth and falsehood, for it has no ground in experience, and thus is subject to the humoral imbalances of the body—'Complexions, Constitutions and Distempers'.

Rodriguez on Greatness

Despite bright spells, the klaxons of winter seem to have arrived early in London. We shiver in the flat, and on the steps of the Embankment, in the gungy puce of an evening, beneath the Needle and sphinges, leading down to the rocks and slippery rubble that pass for a beach under the wall—camera (broken, lens protruding), mobile (broken), fragment of a pipe with valve, bottles (some intact), and a barge of junks moored at the edge—

—at the Library I work and work—I have been tutoring a German lad in the fine arts of feminist literary theory. From the issue desk I collect the books I've been commissioned to read—Shakespeare and Gender, Women's Writing, Erotic Politics, Desire on the Renaissance Stage—and I suffer the shame of a man buying pornography at the kiosk, recalling the time when, as a teenager, I had to purchase an Elton John CD as a gift for my sister. What if someone I know should see me with these books? What should they think? But they aren't for me, I would say—I'm just helping a friend! Judge not, lest ye be judged. Of course, such a shame quails in the agony of reading the damned things.

*

Paul Rodriguez, Lullist and Ruricolist, has put into more substantial form the essays of his blog's first year. Rodriguez likes his Hazlitt and Quincey, he tells me, but Bacon most of all. With a wry irony, he calls Bacon his 'idol'. Myself, I do not care much for Bacon, at least not for his Essays—but still.

Paul's best reflections excite the possibility of conversation. 'Do masterworks tend to occur at the beginning of an art form only because they are easiest then?' he asks. Which immediately prompted me to wonder why masterworks did seem to occur at the beginning of literatures (Homer, Vergil, Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais) but not at the start of painterly canons—the traditional view of the Renaissance, for instance, or of modernism, is of gradual progress towards perfection. What it is about a literature that requires the seal of greatness above the door? Paul notices the disparity across artforms:

Do we always owe the name of greatness to whomever makes way for the rest? Patently, no—in the history of painting, for example, for any virtue we can name the greatest are not the earliest; not even in primitive vigor, where the twentieth century trumps prehistory.

Only Roger Fry could disagree. But this raises questions again. Why, despite our strong distrust of historical singularities, does the twentieth century appear so singular in its cultural (and technological) production? Why should it be that art changed more between 1865 and 1915 than between 1265 and 1865? Why does modernism feel so convincingly like an irrevocable expulsion from Eden?

More freedom does not make work easier. We follow simple orders with clear objectives: write a novel, write a drama, write an essay. The first followed another order: make a work of genius; and that is always a reconaissance in force.

No, it is not freedom but constraint that makes art easier: I cannot help but read the modernist thirst and struggle for artificial constraints—from minimalism and Duchamp to the OuLiPo—as born of a lazy desire for impact: wit and virtuosity at the expense of lasting beauty. Freedom is, in fact, the greatest challenge to the artist: 'The great are not great by being first or earliest in something; rather, by being great, they start something.' How tempting is this view! How the Romantic in us longs to be a Shakespeare, a Picasso!

Rodriguez is a Romantic, by which I mean—and one could almost take this for a definition, almost—that he polarises the great and the good, genius and skill. He is self-assured enough—easy for a pollos, more difficult for an intellectual—still to valorize Leonardo, Beethoven and Homer. (And, oddly, Archimedes.) Christ, he even admires the Mona Lisa as a 'painting which earned its place'! I am inclined to agree. The Gioconda is, paradoxically, an underrated work of art, among those who do not gawp and snap but rather rate and underrate.

*

Paul asks, 'is the phenomenon of greatness only a manifestation of the familiar public taste for the bizarre?' No. Greatness is not reducible to taste, ex hypothesi. The great is always confused with the apparently great, that is, with the lauded; but despite that we must not confuse greatness with apparent greatness. Perhaps it would be better to say that the familiar public taste for the bizarre is a necessary corollary of greatness, an inevitable flinch, serving to make the great less painful to the ungreat, because more remote.

Paul is a Romantic because he polarises the great and the good, the 'honesty of genius' from the 'honesty of the camera or the map'. 'Maps lie,' he says, 'for mappability is what all places have in common: maps deny that places are different'. (Cartographic princess Mary Spence, for what it's worth, feels the same way about internet-mapping, which, she reckons, blands out the landscape it purports to survey.)

I will call a depiction of a place honest if it gives me what I could never learn from maps or satellite photos, but know with a minute of its sunlight; the form of a person, what I could never learn from imaging or lab reports or databases, but know with a minute of their conversation. That kind of honesty is the kind found in greatness, even at the cost of the other.

Here again is a fundamental Romanticism: this honesty of genius is in fact what might better be called insight—that which penetrates the surface. To believe in greatness is to believe that greatness cannot be discerned from surfaces. Hence there is an irreducible difficulty in discerning greatness, and consequently, Paul believes that we should humour greatness: 'we often must accommodate the opinions of those whose judgments we otherwise trust without any evidence of our own'. Here I disagree: greatness should never be humoured, always denied for as long as denial is possible, and only then accepted.

Let us have a thought experiment. Consider those ancients whose works survive to us only in fragments—say, Heraclitus or Sappho. Here is greatness we sense and know, yet cannot prove—a promissory note of greatness that we accept only on the word of writers of good credit.

Let us have as well an anecdote. Recently I read a poem that contained the clause, 'As Heraclitus put it in his Collected Fragments'. The words really stung me, not only because they are thoroughly lacking in poetic merit—for nothing else in this or the other sexdecilliard poems of its stock possesses any poetic merit—and not simply because, as I first articulated, Heraclitus did not put anything in a work entitled Collected Fragments, but because— because the poet had dared to sand and polish, to familiarise. Heraclitus was being implicitly cast as some sort of Poundian modernist, the sort who might produce a book with a title as precious as Collected Fragments. Heraclitus was being made less remote, and less great, because less distinctively Heraclitean. He was simply being assimilated into the general tedium. But it is the very fact of his obscurity and fragmentation, the fact of his historical slipperiness—in Gibbon's words, not of Heraclitus, 'a remote object through the medium of a glimmering and doubtful light'—that, for us, must make Heraclitus Heraclitus. Again, our faith that Heraclitus is fragmentary only by chance, by the whim of history—and the consequent necessity of accepting his words half on trust, with a 'promissory note of greatness'—are intrinsic to the peculiar nature of that greatness.

*

The klaxons of winter have arrived early. We shiver on the steps of the Embankment, in the gungy puce of an evening, beneath the Needle and sphinges, leading down to the rocks and slippery rubble that pass for a beach under the wall—camera, mobile, Erotic Politics, Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Those inglorious words are oozing into the water, and east, out towards the Estuary, to be drunk up as ersatz opinions. From the promontory we look east upon St. Paul's, remote and promissory, as if all else had fallen, like Macaulay's melancholy New Zealander, surveying the ruins of London.

[Update: Paul responds. I realise I have forgotten to say how much I enjoyed his invention of the word 'rebarbicans'.]

The Weeping Philosopher

Scholars do like to spout off. The subject of the Delphic oracle is no exception: it has attracted the usual charivari of feminists and postpostposts. What else would you expect? The oracle is given by the Pythia—a woman—who is 'played like an instrument' or else sexually violated by Apollo, whose words she is made to speak, from a dark cave, in a state of hysterical frenzy—can you conceive any image more inevitably bound for the chair and drill of the derridista?

Giulia Sissa, in a 1987 book on Greek Virginity, tells us in her preface that by the end of the work she will have 'woven around [the Pythia], mysterious in the middle of the world, a web of analogies, similes, and suggestions'. Is this all we want from a scholarly tome? Is it enough? Such a line as this is typical:

Given that the concepts of enthusiasm and inspiration are indispensable for thinking about divination, the unique sense of Pythian utterance needs to be looked at with alertness to what was always unspoken, and perhaps indecent, in the image of a woman who opened her mouth to speak the truth while her body was penetrated by currents and vapors.

Similarly, Page duBois, a singularly pious and irritating writer, whose footnotes consist largely of references to her own books, writes in 1991:

The Apollonian truth, pure and uncontaminated, after passing through the material body of earth and woman, takes on a distorting residue of corporeality that separates and distances the divine word from the mortal seeker.

Again: 'These images of interiority [oracle, temple, etc.] are associated in ancient culture with female space, with the containment and potentiality of the female body.' The reasoning is that because we, with our hyper-associative modernist mentality, can make the analogy between cunt and cave, so the two objects (titivated up, of course, in hackneyed spatial metaphors) must have been 'associated'—whatever that might mean—by the ancient Greeks. It is sort of a magical realism, the most flaccid of modern literary modes, that has pervaded the academy: a sickly obsession with analogies and similarities.

*

And if scholars love the oracle, so they love Heraclitus on the oracle even more. Heraclitus, quoted in Plutarch, writes, '^cο αναξ, ^cου το μαντειον εστι το εν Δελφοις, ουτε λεγει ουτε κρυπτει αλλα σημαινει' (H93). The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither legei nor kryptei, but semainei. You see I have not translated the key words. Legei is usually 'speaks', kryptei 'conceals', and semainei 'indicates' or 'gives a sign'. Philemon Holland in 1603 had 'doth neither speake, nor conceale, but signifie onely and give signe'. Frank Babbitt's Loeb has 'neither tells nor conceals, but indicates'. G. S. Kirk, in the standard English guide to the pre-Socratic philosophers (1957), explains the line:

The method adopted by Apollo in his Delphic pronouncements is praised, because a sign may accord better than a misleadingly explicit statement with the nature of the underlying truth, that of the Logos.

Similarly, Charles Kahn in 1979: 'There is no doubt that Heraclitus is referring to the Delphic practice of giving advice in indirect form, by imagery, riddle, and ambiguity, so that it was obvious to a man of sense than an oracle required an interpretation. . . The Delphic mode of utterance presents a plurality or complexity of meaning, so that reflection is required, and unusual insight, if the proper interpretation is to be discovered.'

For Kirk, 'Probably Heraclitus intended by this kind of parallel to justify his own oracular and obscure style.' For Kahn, 'This parallel between Heraclitus' style and the obscurity of the nature of things, between the difficulty of understanding him and the difficulty in human perception, is not arbitrary: to speak plainly about such a subject would be to falsify it in the telling, for no genuine understanding would be communicated. The only hope of 'getting through' to the audience is to puzzle and provoke them into reflection. Hence the only appropriate mode of explanation is allusive and indirect: Heraclitus is consciously and unavoidably 'obscure'.' For Jonathan Barnes, in the same year, 'Heraclitus the Obscure, the Riddler, the oracular prophet, stands dark and majestic in the early history of philosophy. He set out to imitate 'the king whose is the oracle at Delphi', who, in Heraclitus' own words, 'neither states nor conceals, but gives signs'.'

Robert Lamberton, generally an excellent scholar, gets a little over-excited by this charming maxim; in his 2001 Plutarch he gushes, 'It is no exaggeration to say that semiotics, in the tradition of European thought, starts here, with this notorious, sententious claim'. But it is an exaggeration.

Still, this maxim on meaning and interpretation was clearly ripe for the greedy fingers of the Continentals, and, sure enough, we find the wrangling begins with Heidegger. In his 1939 essay on the concept of physis (nature) in Aristotle, he observes that legei is best translated by contrast to kryptei, 'conceals'—he opts for 'reveals' or even 'unconceals'. Thus:

The oracle does not directly unconceal nor does it simply conceal, but it points out. This means: it unconceals while it conceals, and it conceals while it unconceals.

As my new friend would be quick to remind me, the notion of 'unconcealment' is central to Heidegger's reading of the pre-Socratics—and, indeed, to his entire philosophical project—for as he delights to observe, the Greek word for truth, aletheia, means 'not-hidden'. Legein, 'to speak', is given etymologically as 'to gather', identical to Latin legere, which also means 'to read, choose', whence select and lecture. Legein is thus to gather together and make manifest, a Heideggerian description of the function of language. As some guy called Brian Bard has put it,

This making manifest is the unconcealing of physis which for humans occurs in discourse and language; legein comes to mean 'to say' because language provides the collected space in which beings arise and become manifest.

There is no little joy to be had in playing these etymological games with Greek. No doubt Heidegger also noticed associations between phōnē (voice), phanai (to speak), on the one hand, and phōs (light), phainein (to reveal, appear, bring to light), on the other. The connection is a distinguished one: it is found, just to give three examples, in August Schlegel's 1820 Indische Bibliothek, John Donaldson's 1839 New Cratylus, and Georg Curtius' 1858 Grundzüge. Watkins, on the other hand, lists two distinct but identical roots.

It is hardly surprising that Heidegger, with his own notoriously oracular style, should be fascinated by the oracular Heraclitus, just as Heraclitus praised the oracle itself. (Between Heraclitus and Heidegger stretches a long line of great oracular philosophers whose names begin with 'H'—Hamann, Humboldt, Hegel and Husserl, not to mention Hierkegaard himself.) Hence the pronounced tone of mystical nostalgia for the oral, pre-Socratic mind:

If the Greeks conceive of saying as legein, then this implies an interpretation of the essence of word and of saying so unique that no later 'philosophy of language' can ever begin to imagine its as yet unplumbed depths. Only when language has been debased to a means of commerce and organization, as is the case with us, does thought rooted in language appear to be a mere 'philosophy of words,' no longer adequate to the 'pressing realities of life'.

Paradoxically, Heidegger's friend and interlocutor, Eugen Fink, insists in their published conversation that 'In his fragments, Heraclitus does not speak in any veiled manner like the god in Delphi'. Nonetheless, the weeping philosopher has always attracted, since Heidegger, scholars with a penchant for the oracular style; one of the most recent examples being the gorgeous and monumental Sunbowl or Symbol (1998) by G. L. J. Schönbeck. More well-known and more influential, on the other hand, is a book by Jean Bollack and his student Heinz Wismann, Héraclite ou la séparation (1972), based on Bollack's lectures of the late 60s. Unlike Heidegger, Kirk, Kahn or Barnes, Bollack sees no consistent philosophy, cosmology or metaphysics in Heraclitus, all that being the product of the Stoics or Platonists (such as Plutarch) who transmitted his fragments. A priori the thesis attracts me, but alas, its exposition is pure turgid bullshit in the French style. Here is a sample of their two pages on H93:

Applying to the oracle's ambiguity the categories of their own discourse, men would interpret it as true (speaking) or false (concealing), so that it accords or not with the outcome which they await or have experienced. The equivocal oracular word seems here to remain a determinate affirmation, whether truthful or mendacious. In fact, it transcends the opposition and escapes the dilemma. Divine discourse neither speaks nor conceals because it speaks-and-conceals, indicating by what it says that which it does not say.

Bollack has clearly inherited Heidegger's taste for concluding a paragraph of over-inflated and jargonistic waffle with an over-compressed koan—as if hoping to compensate Scylla with Charybdis. He succeeds in sounding profound without actually making any contribution to the fragment's interpretation.

And what of the feminists?

Sissa: the god does not speak; he does not press his seal into a totally impressionable and malleable substance. Nor does the god conceal, as if he wished to deceive in the manner of a distorting mirror. Rather, using the soul as an instrument, Apollo reveals his truth in a "mixed," confused, pallid form. The Pythia's psyche, though not false to the truth, inevitably diminishes its brilliance.

And duBois: The word semainei demands our attention here because it is sometimes used synonymously with sphragizo, 'to stamp with a sign or mark, to seal'. This metaphor for the relationship between the god, the medium, and the consultant of the oracle bears echoes of the earlier discussion of inscription on the body as a marker of truth, of the contents, the nature of the thing marked. Here the body of the woman is stamped, sealed, with the god's truth: the body itself becomes a sign, with its acoustic rendition of the ineffable divine truth.

So the one says the Pythia is stamped and sealed, the other says she isn't. One describes the soul (psyche), the other the body. Both are equally meaningless: 'not even wrong'. Of the two, duBois is the worse simply because she is the more hackneyed. Her pathological but wholly typical obsession with the body is just not warranted by the material, nor is the fact that a given word can be used in other senses. Sissa's reading, while inarticulate, is at least rooted in Plutarch's text, which continues, '[Apollo] makes known and reveals his own thoughts, but he makes them known through the associated medium of a mortal body and a soul that is unable to keep quiet'. Lamberton, likewise, writes that 'if Heraclitus pointed to a tertium quid for the pair 'speak—conceal', he must have meant this projection of meaning down the hierarchy, with the attendant necessary distortion introduced by the medium'. Is that a pun on 'medium'?

We seem to have wound up with a very pretty modern allegory for the mouth betraying the brain, or else for the différance of the sign. Heraclitus weeps.

Horlicks

A friend sends me a link to an article in the Scientific American, entitled 'An Unethical Ethicist?' I try to read through the intricate morality tale, but all I can think about is the word, ethicist. Why does it stick in my craw?

*

The word's suffix groups it with physicist, geneticist, classicist, historicist, lyricist, publicist—the OED lists 133 in total, but the others are either compounds or much more obscure. This group, however, is illusory: or rather, it consists of two meaningful groups—those words that derive from nouns and adjectives in –ic, and those that derive from nouns in –ics. Thus: lyric, public, historic, on one side, and physics, genetics, classics, and ethics on the other. Here it will be worth quoting the OED at length, on –ic and –ics:

In English, such words of this class as were in use before 1500 had the singular form, and were usually written, after French, –ique, –ike, as arsmetike, magike, musike, logike (–ique), retorique, mathematique (–ike, –ik), mechanique, economique, ethyque (–ik); this form is retained in arithmetic, logic, magic, music, rhetoric (though logics has also been used). But, from the 15th c., forms in –ics (–iques) occur as names of treatises; and in the second half of the 16th c. this form is found applied to the subject-matter of such treatises, in mathematics, economics, etc. From 1600 onward, this has been the accepted form with names of sciences, as acoustics, conics, dynamics, ethics, linguistics, metaphysics, optics, statics, or matters of practice, as æsthetics, athletics, economics, georgics, gymnastics, politics, tactics.

The formation of agent-nouns in –ic is predictable: arithmetic, logic, magic, music and rhetoric all have agents in –ician (although we also have rhetor, straight from the Greek). But –ics is unpredictable. Mathematics has –ician. Economics has not economicist but economist. Linguistics, likewise, has linguist, although curiously, the OED offers linguistician ('One who is versed in linguistics') as opposed to linguist ('One who is skilled in the use of languages', 'A student of language; a philologist', but not a student of linguistics). Athletics has athlete, and gymnastics gymnast. Georgics, of course, has nothing.

But hold on a moment; let's look at these groupings. Are we really to say that 'æsthetics, athletics, economics, georgics, gymnastics, politics, tactics' go together as 'matters of practice', as opposed to 'sciences'? Surely aesthetics and politics sit neatly next to ethics, just as economics fits next to linguistics. The streamlining of categories is beginning to look like a mess.

Still worse when we examine types of agents themselves. The politician is the man who practices politics, while the politicist—there are citations old and new in the OED—is the man who studies it. But the aesthetician, like the aestheticist, is the man who studies aesthetics; the practicer is the aesthete, which in turn goes formally with athlete. Metaphysics has been studied both by metaphysicians and, less recently, by metaphysicists. The criteria for –icist as against –ician appears bound neither to form nor to function. Rules collapse.

*

Before I began thinking about this in detail, ethicist stuck in my craw because its suffix seemed to give it a legitimacy as a technical discipline, like physicist and geneticist. But the whole point about ethics, to me, is that it is utterly lacking such an apparatus, despite the efforts of generations. To say 'I'm a physicist' is to identify not just your profession, but your body of knowledge—your scientia. But to say 'I'm an ethicist' is to identify only a profession: your body of knowledge can be no different to that of another. The very notion of an ethicist seemed, and I think still seems, incoherent to me: at best he could be reduced to a policy-maker, a jurist, a counsellor, or a bloviator. Hence the Wiki list of ethicists is really just a list of thinkers, or even more blandly, of people.

If we consult the OED on ethicist, we are in for a surprise. The first thing it says is '= ETHICIAN'. Indeed, ethician is attested earlier, from 1889, whereas ethicist appears only in 1891. French, by way of comparison, seems more comfortable with éthicien than with éthiciste, although the Trésor lists neither. Ethician seemed to fit better with aesthetician and metaphysician. We all have our ethics, our aesthetics and our metaphysics; none has validity as an objective scientia. And so one wants the morphology to reflect the conceptual agreement: one wants a stricter distinction between –icist and –ician.

But, damn it, there are mathematicians, physicians, technicians and all the rest. Language betrays me. It always does.

Ahasuerus

By the time I wander to bed Lily is already asleep, wreathed in shadows. Her form is barely visible, half under the silk sheets, scotopically indiscernible as scarlet, barely lit by the first few photons of morning twilight—the whole effect is of a late Malevich, black on not quite black. I nudge and prog at a dormant knee that has invaded my half of the bed, so as to enter, and she stirs still asleep, recontorts herself, like a kitten, and as I settle my head on the pillow, she comes to rest with her shoulders pressing down against mine. I lie half-trapped, restless as ever, contemplating.

I have stayed up all night finishing Sartor Resartus. It is the sort of book you stay up all night finishing, even if you have read it before. I find it immensely difficult to turn the pages—and often I find myself turning them, only to realise I have hardly understood or digested the page apparently just read. I force myself to go back, mostly. And I read it in different editions. First in my undated but elegantly bound Ward & Lock edition from around the turn of the last century. Then in Rodger Tarr's critical edition in the Library. Finally on Gutenberg.

Sartor is curious in its combination of two usually distinct modes of Romantic thought—the 'total irony' of Tieck and early Schlegel; and the yearning floridity of Werther, Novalis or Wordsworth. It is Nietzsche contra Wagner. Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, the protagonist, stands for the latter; his editor for the former. Of course it is not that simple—but it is the duality of these two moods that most strikes me in the work.

In the middle of the second book, Teufelsdrockh gets dumped.

I was alone, alone! Ever too the strong inward longing shaped Phantasms for itself: towards these, one after the other, must I fruitlessly wander. A feeling I had, that for my fever-thirst there was and must be somewhere a healing Fountain. To many fondly imagined Fountains, the Saints' Wells of these days, did I pilgrim; to great Men, to great Cities, to great Events: but found there no healing. In strange countries, as in the well-known; in savage deserts, as in the press of corrupt civilization, it was ever the same: how could your Wanderer escape from—his own Shadow?

You see how quickly Carlyle shifts tone. The syntax of that last line has the zesty unmistakeable ring of—Zarathustra. "Wer hat nicht für seinen guten Ruf schon einmal—sich selbst geopfert?" "Was meinte jener Gott, welcher anrieth: 'erkenne dich selbst'! Hiess es vielleicht: 'höre auf, dich etwas anzugehn! werde objektiv!'—Und Sokrates?—Und der 'wissenschaftliche Mensch'?" But for the moment I am less concerned with the gangasrotagati, and more with Carlyle's image of the wanderer and his shadow. Tarr annotates:

Compare Goethe's epigram: 'Was lehr' ich dich von allen Dingen? — / Könntest mich lehren von meiner Schatte zu springen!" (What shall I teach thee, the foremost thing? / Couldst teach me off my own shadow to spring!) Compare also The Life of John Sterling (1851), 130.

This is lazy editorship. 'Compare, compare, compare.' Well, why? Is there a broader context? Tarr doesn't tell us. It's also a rotten translation of the German. And as for John Sterling (1851), p. 130, there is no p. 130. Or rather it is a blank page immediately following a chapter-heading. I go on Gutenberg's John Sterling and word-search 'shadow'. And I find no remotely plausible match. Like his namesake, Tarr is evidently messing with us.

But consider this. Carlyle was writing Sartor around 1830. He knows modern German literature back to front, and he knows older German literature pretty damn well too. In 1830 he also begins writing a History of German Literature; the primary focus of this is Märchen and folklore, and yet it doesn't get much beyond the Nibelungenlied. Given these facts, it seems inconceivable that Carlyle was not familiar with what was, since its 1814 publication, one of the most famous books in Germany—Chamisso's latter-day fairytale, Peter Schlemihl. This is a story about a man who diabolically bargains off his shadow for a bag of inexhaustible wealth, is exiled from society, and becomes a wanderer. Chamisso himself was something of a wanderer—a French nobleman who left during the Revolution. In a letter to Madame de Staël, he wrote:

I am nowhere at home. I am a Frenchman in Germany and a German in France. A Catholic among Protestants, a Protestant among Catholics, a Jacobin among aristocrats, an aristocrat among democrats.

(Compare Einstein's famous quip: 'If relativity is proved right the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew.' Or don't.)

Ruth Wisse, in a book on schlemihl literature, reads the shadow of Chamisso's Schlemihl as 'that extension of the self which is visible to others though extraneous to its owner. In the self-sufficiency of his room Peter does not miss his shadow, but the moment he attempts to mingle in society, he is mocked and ostracized'. When the Devil wants to swap back his shadow in exchange for his soul, Schlemihl refuses to trade—for the outer soul is less important than the inner soul, which must be protected at all costs.


In one scene, he discovers his shadow in a wood and chases after it:

The shadow on my moving fled before me, and I was compelled to begin an active chase after the unsubstantial wanderer. The eager desire to be released from the perplexities in which I stood armed me with unusual strength. It fled to a distant wood, in whose obscurity it necessarily would have been immediately lost.

Sadly, he doesn't catch it. The Devil retains possession. And later, when the Devil, walking beside him, allows him the temporary loan of his shadow, Schlemihl tries to start his horses and race off with it, but

I could not elope with the shadow, it slipped away when the horse started, and waited on the road for its lawful owner. I was obliged to turn round, ashamed; the man in the grey coat, as he unconcernedly finished his tune, began to laugh at me, and fixing the shadow again in its place, informed me it would only stick to me, and remain with me, when I had properly and lawfully become possessed of it. 'I hold you fast,' he cried, 'fast attached to the shadow; you cannot escape from me.'

In Peter Schlemihl, the wanderer has, much to his own chagrin, escaped from his own shadow, or rather it has escaped from him. I find it much more likely that Carlyle had this story in mind than an epigram by Goethe. Teufelsdrockh, like Schlemihl, is a Judaified German—a Wandering Jew. But for Carlyle, the shadow of a man is not a boon which grants him free access to society—it is a spectre of doubt, haunting him. Schlemihl is a wanderer because he has no shadow, but Teufelsdrockh is a wanderer because he has a shadow. Vain truly, he later adds, is the hope of your swiftest Runner to escape "from his own Shadow"! And still later, Teufelsdrockh exclaims—

Wretchedness was still wretched; but I could now partly see through it, and despise it. Which highest mortal, in this inane Existence, had I not found a Shadow-hunter, or Shadow-hunted; and, when I looked through his brave garnitures, miserable enough?

All wretched mortals are, like Schlemihl, hunting Shadows. (True, we are getting back to Plato's Cave as well—but nuances have begun to accumulate.)

Try him [man] with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men.—Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

A 'black spot in our sunshine'—is Carlyle thinking of the other Diogenes, who bid the great Alexander to 'stand out of my sunlight'? (This related, incidentally, by yet another Diogenes.) Compare, compare, compare.

*

Did you think I wasn't going to mention Nietzsche again? Nietzsche has not one but two wanderers-and-his-shadow. The first is a little standalone bit that comes as a second sequel (1880) to his transitional work, Human, All Too Human. The Wanderer converses with his Shadow as a prologue and epilogue to a collection of aphorisms in the traditional Nietzschean manner.

The Shadow: It occurred to me that I've often been at your heels like a dog, and that you then—

The Wanderer: And couldn't I do in all haste something to please you? Don't you have a desire?

The Shadow: Nothing, except perhaps the same desire that the philosophical 'dog' had of the great Alexander: move a little out of the sun, it's getting too cold for me.

What is the Shadow for Nietzsche? A creature of the light:

The Wanderer: Only now do I notice how impolite I am, my beloved shadow: I have not said a word about how pleased I am to see you as well as hear you. You should know that I love the shadow as much as I cherish the light. For facial beauty, clarity of speech, quality and firmness of character, shadow is as necessary as light. They are not opponents: they are rather affectionate, holding hands—and if the light disappears, the shadow slips away after it.

The Shadow: And I hate the same thing you hate: the night; I love human beings, because they are devotees of light and I'm pleased when their eyes shine as they discern and discover knowledge—untiring knowers and discoverers that they are. That shadow, which all things cast, if the sunshine of perception falls upon them—that shadow am I as well.

A paradox: the shadow is allied not to darkness but to light. He is perhaps the dark and wise part of the soul that only appears in high contrast: only appears in the day, in affirmation. The Shadow is a familiar. Teufelsdrockh tried to shake his off; Schlemihl tried to recover his—Nietzsche's Wanderer learns from his. And Zarathustra meets his shadow too. (What book could be more like Sartor than Zarathustra?) At first he runs away, hoping to escape it: but as we have learnt, he cannot. He turns to confront the wretched being.

'Who art thou?' asked Zarathustra vehemently, 'what doest thou here? And why callest thou thyself my shadow? Thou art not pleasing unto me.'

'Forgive me,' answered the shadow, 'that it is I; and if I please thee not—well, O Zarathustra! therein do I admire thee and thy good taste. A wanderer am I, who have walked long at thy heels; always on the way, but without a goal, also without a home: so that verily, I lack little of being the eternally Wandering Jew, except that I am not eternal and not a Jew.'

Zarathustra's Shadow represents freedom without constraint: 'This seeking for my home: O Zarathustra, dost thou know that this seeking hath been my home-sickening; it eateth me up. Where is—my home? For it do I ask and seek, and have sought, but have not found it. O eternal everywhere, O eternal nowhere, O eternal—in-vain!'

And so Zarathustra delivers a little sermon: 'Thy danger is not small, thou free spirit and wanderer! To such unsettled ones as thou, seemeth at last even a prisoner blessed. Didst thou ever see how captured criminals sleep? They sleep quietly, they enjoy their new security. Beware lest in the end a narrow faith capture thee, a hard, rigorous delusion! For now everything that is narrow and fixed seduceth and tempteth thee.'

It is necessary to recall that this is not any old shadow, but Zarathustra's shadow: and so it is his opposite and double. The shadow is always a principle within us, an anima, that contains our opposite. It is always a burden. It was, in fact, a burden even for Schlemihl. For at the end of the book, divested of his shadow, he takes wing, leaving society and communing directly with nature, clad in seven-league boots. We must always have an ambivalent relation to our shadow, desiring and despising it, seeking to escape, and seeking to return. The shadow is there, a presence, and not there, an absence. It is beautiful because it is most like us. And so they say that art was first created when man tried to trace the outline of his own shadow in the sand. But it is not us: it is, even, the not-us.

*

We have been wandering for some time now. You will excuse me, reader. Why, you ask? It is in your nature. After all, I trust you have been—following closely.

Scalpjaggers

Last week at the Wake reading-group. Turned into a fine bloody spectacle! For who should show up but Ben Watson and Bob "Bob Dobbs" Dean? They were recording for a radio programme. Which one? Forgot to ask.

— Arra irrara hirrara man, weren't they arriving in clansdestinies for the Imbandiment of Ad Regias Agni Dapes, fogabawlers and panhibernskers, after the crack and the lean years, scalpjaggers and houthhunters, like the messicals of the great god. . .

Arra irrara hirrara, said Watson; it's someone clearing their throat, isn't it? Yes, we said. Very important, clearing the throat, said Watson. Started talking about a Frank Zappa song which begins with the sound of someone (Zappa?) clearing his throat. It's a rhetorical gesture, said Watson, it gets the audience's attention. It's very powerful. At this stage I was looking round the room, but no one caught my eye. The point is, added Watson, that he's clearing his throat.

And so it continued. Messicals, said W., presiding. 'Musicals', someone said. 'Messengers', said another. 'Mass', I said. Just throwing it out there. 'Vesicles', said Watson. Alright, said W., and all those things you've said are doubtlessly in there. (Except 'vesicle'.) But all the free-association in the world won't elucidate the text. What you need is a rationale, some way of distinguishing good guesses from bad ones. W.'s preference, for instance, is for looking at drafts, and considering themes on a broader level. Watson found this hierophantical. (Did he use the word?) You just want to impose your reading as the correct one, he said. You've got the draft books in front of you as a key to the meaning, and they've solved the riddle. What's the point? Watson himself knew better. When I read the Wake to the average person, he said—you know, not necessarily intellectual, academic types, but just ordinary people with life experience, they get it immediately.

Watson, it later turns out, said much the same on his website:

Yet everybody to whom you read a sentence of the Wake will provide some information from their own particular walk of life which will illuminate your understanding—of the Wake, of themselves, of the world.

I actually tried this today. I took my trusty Penguin Wake onto the streets of London in search of the vox populi. At first I thought I'd surprise people. Unuchorn! Ungulant! Uvuloid! Uskybeak! I barked at a passing Rastafarian, who gave me such a terrifying look that I decided to stick to gentler passages from then on. I picked out an attractive middle-aged proletess and approached her with Any dog's life you list you may still hear them at it—but she only turned her head and snapped Fack orff!! at me. (For a while I thought she was quoting back Joyce, but sadly I couldn't locate the phrase in the Wake concordance. . .) Finally I took an elderly gentleman aside, with a tie and checked shirt and tweed jacket, and asked his opinion.

— Tugbag is Baggut's, I said, when a crispin sokolist besoops juts kamps or clapperclaws an irvingite offthedocks. A luckchange, I see.

He was still looking blankly at me, so I continued; only I'd lost my place and had to start somewhere else, hoping he wouldn't notice.

— That pekumiary pond is beyawnd my pinnigay pretonsions. I am resting on a pigs of cheesus but I've a big suggestion it was about the pint of porter.

— Ah, he said, his eyes lighting up. Porter! I did use to like a good pint of the stuff. But you can't get it like it used to be. Mass-produced now. It's all them brewing corporations. Run by Yanks. And the Irish. (His eyes darkened again.)

I had to concede that the gentleman had, indeed, managed to tell me something about the world, and about himself; but if he had any pearls about Joyce's experimental masterpiece, I was not astute enough to catch them. However, let us attribute the failure of my experiment to mere chance. Or perhaps I didn't affect a convincing Dublin accent? After all, we are all fond of that persistent story that the Wake is perfectly lucid when read aloud in a good brogue. We can try again next week. As for Watson, he hasn't finished, oh no:

Joyce evaded the British wartime censors. . . by producing a book of "incomprehensible gibberish"—incomprehensible to every "educated" person, that is, who's forgotten that everything written is merely a transcription of something said in lust or anger or accountancy or pure punning fun.

(Mostly pure punning fun, though.)

[Finnegans Wake] has of course has been roundly condemned and squarely rejected as "unreadable" or "difficult" by politicans, academics, journalists and mass-media spokepersons who wish to keep alive the desiccated, non-lived, duped and BORING spectacle of life supplied to us by those who rule. But the Wake has been celebrated and pored-over and disputed and read—read read RED—by all true REVOLUTIONARIES, SURREALISTS, BEATS, POETS, FREE IMPROVISORS, ZAPPA FANS & COCKROACH-FANCIERS as the Bible of Post-Capitalism, our glimpse of a humanist democracy beyond war, exploitation, media manipulation and the money form, where MATERIALIST RECOGNITION OF OUR ACTUAL LIVES (what the Communist Manifesto called "facing with sober senses our real conditions of life and our relations to our kind") becomes the open swinging-bar door on a limitless realm of play, adventure, learning, social contact and sexual bliss.

I can assure the reader that I am not quoting Henry Miller. Nor an eighteen year-old—this is a man in his fifties. But you just have to quote this stuff at length to get a feel for the SHOUTY REPETITIVE BORINGNESS of it. His own position he encapsulates as follows:

Joyce and Zappa explode the boundaries of bourgeois politesse and a rational public order sustained by legal contracts between supposedly equal citizens. They reveal an actuality of lust, greed and lies beneath the bourgeois veneer.

Watson is of course the sort of bloke for whom 'bourgeois' is the worst possible insult, because it can only ever denote a 'veneer'. Lucky for Watson, he can find enough in Joyce to agree with him. He quotes a letter to Stanislaus (conveniently located in Ellman's biography, p. 204):

You have often shown opposition to my socialistic tendencies. But can you not see plainly from facts like these that a deferment of the emancipation of the proletariat, a reaction to clericalism or aristocracy or bourgeoisism would mean a revulsion to tyrannies of all kinds?

All well and good, and more on Joyce's antiburgherism can be found all over the internet. Still, the conflation of Finnegans Wake with soixante-huitard social and artistic ideals is terribly unimaginative. You can find it all in there: drugs, sex, pop music, dreams, satire. But so what? Watson wanted from the group a polyphonic clamour of voices, each member adducing suggestions, each enriching the text with additional meanings, each making it still bigger, more colourful, more like the very world itself. Only for Watson, none of these meanings might become authoritative—because to be authoritative is to limit other possibilities. Watson wants chaos. His friend, Dean, who claimed to have been Marshall McLuhan's archivist, and who seems to have led a rather Munchhausenish life on the internet, babbled about the Wake being a single sentence from start to finish ('No, it isn't', W. drily observed) or a fractal or a technicolor explosion of vortex patterns or a chaotic radio transmission of all history or a space-time singularity of psychedelic laser language or something very grand like that.

Later, W. used the word 'characterisation', and Watson sneered, Oh! I'm just allergic to your way of thinking! You academics, you find a work of art you can't categorise, and you try and reduce it to a bourgeois novel. Characters! This isn't a novel! And so on, like a petulant teenager. We were all a bit nonplussed. The whole room was bristling and eager to see what would happen next. Joyceans gegen killjoyceans. Like I said, it was a fun evening.

*

I'm interested in this trope—that the academics have it all wrong, and that we have only to open our eyes to see the truth. Of course it stems from a Romantic mindset, that education is really indoctrination, that society and capital (both perpetuated by educators, and especially academics) are denying us our authentic proletariat freedoms. I found the same basic idea in M. J. Harper's The History of Britain Revealed, which I purchased yesterday. (It has also been published in America under the title, The Secret History of the English Language.) Harper's basic thesis is that our picture of language history is all wrong: English doesn't come from Anglo-Saxon—it's obvious how different the two languages are—but has been around since the Ice Age; French and Italian and Spanish don't come from Latin—for they are more similar to each other than to Latin, with which they have only a lexical affinity—but from English, while Latin was invented by Italians as short-hand for trading purposes; and so on and so on. Language Hat noticed the book a while ago:

I didn't have time to read it, but I flipped through it and noted that it purported to be claiming that Middle English never existed and that English was the ancestor of the Romance languages, among other things so silly I assumed it couldn't be serious.

Hat says:

If the book were claiming that Queen Elizabeth was the illegitimate son of Rasputin, or that mixing salt and sugar provides an inexhaustible source of energy that will replace oil and gas, no one would take it seriously; if it were reviewed at all, it would be as an example of how absolutely anything can get published. But equivalent nonsense about language is reviewed respectfully, and it makes me despair.

This is pretty sloppy. After all, just look at the responses to Anatoly Fomenko's History: Fiction or Science?, which claims that Christ was born around 1000 AD, and that a thousand years of history have just been invented. (Incidentally, Harper makes similar claims, p. 84: 'Rum things crawl out from the historical record when several hundred years of spurious history have somehow got themselves inserted into the real world', referring to the period 1250-750 BC.) Or to Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, which claims that ancient Indian gurus had mystical foreknowledge of modern quantum physics. Or to Martin Bernal's Black Athena, which claims that the highlights of Western culture came from Egypt, and a black African Egypt at that. (The book was taken seriously enough that a formal refutation was published.) Or look at the respect accorded to Judith Butler, merely for being a feminist lesbian and looking like one too. Patrick "Pyramid Power" Flanagan, let us not forget, was vaunted in Time magazine. And what was that about polywater? The fact is, Mr. Hat, nonsense about every subject under the sun has been reviewed respectfully. There's really no need to despair!

Now Harper, like Watson, hates academics, whose disciplines are 'cosy niches for intellectually unenquiring people'. Sometimes he lets rip:

You should, throughout this book, be asking yourself why the blindingly obvious things outlined here from time to time are so studiously ignored by professional historians and, having come to the conclusion that this is a moderately scandalous situation, you should then apply these thoughts to academics and academia in general. And rise up and kick the rascals out.

For Harper, academics (or 'historians') have been perpetuating 'creation myths' about the origin of the English people and their language, not to mention the other Europeans, from the beginning. They aren't malicious—just foolish and blinkered, which is to be expected, as their training necessitates it. On the idea that English evolved from Anglo-Saxon via 'Middle English':

Of course we mustn't be too harsh on the generations of linguists, philologists and etymologists who produced this stuff. . . Every last one of them was intensively instructed on this matter in their first year as undergraduates (by certified experts), given an examination to see if the information had taken firm root (they all passed), lived their entire professional lives among people who believe it to be self evidently-true. . . and have never given the matter another thought from that to day to this (and, believe me, they're not about to start now).

As Harper observes, universities are intellectually conservative; change is slow, and revolution very rare, unless of course your name is Noam. All institutions, in fact, are conservative. It is in their nature: it is how they remain corporate, and how they are preserved from every passing fancy that might trouble their hulls. Sometimes this is a bad thing—the canonical example might be the dogmatism of the Church regarding Copernican and Galilean science. But often it is good, as demonstrated by all the cranks—and here linguistics is a great field—whose silly contributions made no dent at all on taught wisdom. The problem is that it is very difficult to distinguish the one situation from the other at the present time. The rather worthy Sally Thomason bemoans, more naïvely than Mr. Hat, the positive reviews garnered by Harper on amazon:

In any case, we find again that Harper and his ilk make "so damn much sense", while linguists, contaminated by Establishment connections (like, academic training and jobs relevant to that training), are hide-bound types blinded by meaningless tradition, and therefore sure to be wrong. (One might ask why the public is so ready to believe someone who asserts that "the experts" are deluded on a whole raft of issues but who offers not one single piece of evidence in support of his assertions; but one would be foolish to bother asking.)

It is useless expecting the public to be able to evaluate evidence on technical matters. Either they listen to those who call themselves experts, or they listen to those who give reasons to doubt a priori the authenticity of this expertise. When in 1686 Bernard de Fontenelle wanted to convince the intellectual world that they had been completely wrong on the subject of the pagan oracles, he did two things: first, he showed why earlier historians might have believed what they did, despite being mistaken; and second, he painted an entirely speculative, but nonetheless convincing picture of what really happened at the oracles. Fontenelle has been portrayed for centuries as an intellectual hero, while his contemporary adversaries made much the same point as Thomason:

In this Age one may be sure, a new Opinion, however ill prov'd, will not fail to gain its Followers, provided it favours the inclination Men have to Incredulity. . . Thus those who believe are induc'd to examine the Reasons against believing, to deliver themselves if possible, from this so measly Bondage; and they who do not believe, thinking it a great Happiness to be freed from this troublesome Yoke, do naturally avoid all that might bring them under it; and are much more inclin'd to inform themselves of the Reasons against believing, that they fortify themselves still more in their Incredulity, than of those which might oblige them to believe.

This is why Harper's book is advertised as appealing to 'anyone who has ever thought twice about what they've learned in school'. The rhetoric is that, if you learn at school, you are just swallowing opinions—and that swallowing opinions doesn't produce Newtons or Einsteins, or Fontenelles, or Harpers or Watsons. Bacon thought like this, so did Descartes, so did Voltaire. And indeed there's some truth to it, man. But it is a teenager's truth, or a Romantic truth, which amounts to the same. There is also the truth of the Church and the Academy to compete with it: and that too is a truth. Therein is the problem. Everywhere I turn, I meet it again: do I trust the rhetoric of novelty, or the rhetoric of experience and expertise? Boris or Ken? Obama or Clinton? It is inescapable, and rules for deciding cannot be formulated in advance.

With Harper, it is easier to make a judgement because so many of his individual claims are weak. His book demonstrates another principle: that it is much harder to make small corrections to a big picture than to paint it again from scratch. Harper wants to make one correction—that French doesn't come from Latin—and this forces him to make another correction—that French must come from English—and therefore another—that English is ancient—and another—that English is not from Anglo-Saxon—and by the way the theory of evolution is wrong, and so is the OED, and so on and so on, until (superficially) the linguistic facts have all been saved. It's an enormous juggling act. And it is incredibly easy to see how it might convince an intelligent person, who is seduced first by one proposition, then another, which seems to follow so easily from it. But to suggest, as Thomason does, that linguists are fighting a 'battle with unreason', whether they are losing or not, is grossly complacent. At least Mr. Hat admits that one can take pleasure from the book, spoof or not: 'I'm keeping it around for my own amusement, after all'.

On the Patriarchy

Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness is an odd book, that's for sure. In what other work of modern scholarship would you find an expression like 'a crotch of upper branch awninged with green leaves'? The OED does indeed list 'crotch' in the sense (#4) of 'The fork of a tree or bough, where it divides into two limbs or branches', though it has no more recent usage than 1889. But the use of 'branch' here is very strange: it is treated almost as a mass noun, without article or quantifier. And although 'awninged' is correct, I wish it were 'awned'.

If you dipped into the first chapter, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a book on language. Jaynes, like Mencius, likes toying with English and coming up with new terms—for instance, he coins 'struction' to cover both instruction and construction. After insisting (as would George Lakoff, much more famously, four years later) that metaphor is the 'very constitutive ground of language', Jaynes goes on to coin 'metaphier' and 'metaphrand' as the two parts of a metaphor. (I. A. Richards had already done this, of course, in his 1936 Philosophy of Rhetoric, with the terms 'vehicle' and 'tenor'. And let's not even talk about Saussure, whose semantics had largely been invented by the ancient Stoics.) Science, declares Jaynes, like Vaihinger before him, is determined by metaphors, while

Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb ‘to be’ was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, “to breathe.”

A. S. Diamond, in his brilliant Origin of Language, reckoned the original of am and asti as 'to eat', noting the similarity of Latin esse (to be) / esse (to eat), and correlating food with life. In his 1690 Essay, Book 3, chapter 1, section 5, John Locke had asserted the 'sensible' (sensory) origin of all words:

SPIRIT, in its primary signification, is breath; ANGEL, a messenger: and I doubt not but, if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names which stand for things that fall not under our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas.

Sadly, as Hans Aarsleff has pointed out, there is no sensible origin for the root of the word 'mind', 'mens' etc. And similarly, linguists have come up dud on the two roots of the verbum abstractum, es- and bheu- as Watkins lists them. Finally, Jaynes gets to consciousness itself, which he visualises as 'an analogy of what is called the real world. . . built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world'. Truth be damned, this is sublime stuff! Finally he introduces the 'paraphrand', or the body of associations and salient attributes of the metaphrand. This lets him write:

The map-maker and map-user are doing two different things. For the map-maker, the metaphrand is the blank piece of paper on which he operates with the metaphier of the land he knows and has surveyed. But for the map-user, it is just the other way around. The land is unknown; it is the land that is the metaphrand, while the metaphier is the map which he is using, by which he understands the land. And so with consciousness. Consciousness is the metaphrand when it is being generated by the paraphrands of our verbal expressions. But the functioning of consciousness is, as it were, the return journey. Consciousness becomes the metaphier full of our past experience, constantly and selectively operating on such unknowns as future actions, decisions, and partly remembered pasts, on what we are and yet may be. And it is by the generated structure of consciousness that we then understand the world.

So consciousness is sort of a map of reality, generated by language and used by memory, in a constant oscillation. Presumably Jaynes is riffing on, or perhaps just ripping off, that famous motto of Alfred Korzybski. Consciousness comes to be built up from a linguistic model of events via 'narratization', by which our actions are moulded into coherent patterns of cause and effect over time. (MacIntyre thinks this narrativity has been lost. Raminagrobis agrees, sort of.)

*

Later, much later, Jaynes describes superstition as 'only a metaphier grown wild to serve a need to know'. This rather reminded me of a description of Elizabethan prose I once came across: 'the intense elaboration of the vehicle causes the tenor to recede uncomfortably close to disappearing altogether'. Both lines evoke a fault: the supererogation of the subaltern, by which the map is taken for the territory, the model extended too far. Thus Marx generalised from his time to all time; Freud from a few patients to all patients, and all symptoms. Wittgenstein had claimed something similar in the 1921 Tractatus:

There is no possible way of making an inference from one situation to the existence of another, entirely different situation. There is no causal nexus to justify such an inference. We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present. Superstition [Aberglaube] is nothing but belief in the causal nexus.

(Our friend Yusef will be keen to learn Hitler's opinions on superstition, no doubt: 'Superstition, I think, is a factor one must take into consideration when assessing human conduct, even though one may rise superior to it oneself and laugh at it. It was for this reason, to give you a concrete example, that I once advised the Duce not to initiate a certain action on the thirteenth of the month. Such things are the imponderables of life, which one cannot afford to neglect, for those who believe in them are quite capable, at a moment of crisis, of causing the greatest consternation.')

The view of superstition presented by Jaynes and Wittgenstein has its roots in classical antiquity. Theophrastus simply defines deisidaimonia (superstition) as 'cowardice in regard to the supernatural'. But Plutarch, writing about 400 years later, develops deisidaimonia, literally a 'fear of the daemons', as manifest in a propensity to over-interpret natural signs: 'he who is afraid of the gods, is in fear of everything—the sea, the air, the sky, darkness, light, a call, silence, a dream'—'to the superstitious man, every infirmity of body, every loss of money, or loss of children, every unpleasantness or failure in political matters, are called "plagues from God," and "assaults of the demon"'. This is line with Plutarch's general approach to the world as a system of signs to be decoded: superstition is a failure to interpret signals, an inference beyond that which can be made, just as for modern thinkers it is a misconstrued model of reality.