Goethe and the Ancients and Moderns

Latin: "the language of the Catholic Church and of all the schools in Christendom, ... an indispensable necessity .. as much for philosophy and theology as for jurisprudence and medicine; and it is, for that very reason ... the common language of all the scholars of Europe." That was written in 1765, in the entry on "language" in the French Encyclopédie. I came across this quote in the fascinating book Latin or the Empire of a Sign by the French scholar (or "archiviste paléographe," as the French Wikipedia describes her) Françoise Waquet.

I am only about half way through, but it has been truly exciting reading, making even more understandable the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, especially as it erupted in France at the end of the 17th century. As Waquet points out, early in the reign of Louis XIV "Latin literature, especially poetry, was still being cultivated and attracting real interest." By the 1660s already, however, most of the output consisted of epigrams, elegies, satires, tomb inscriptions, and epitaphs." In 1682 Pierre Bayle would observe that Latin poetry was "breathing its last." Still, more than half the books exchanged at the Frankfurt book fairs were in Latin well until the 1680s.

Interestingly, the period from 1530 to 1640, during which occurred seminal discoveries in science, the "old language" continued to be used for the higher forms of learning, "from literature to law, from science to theology." Latin was the center of the curriculum in Europe from the Renaissance, while the vernacular languages were slow in developing literary status. There was also the absence, especially outside of London and Paris, of a "cultivated reading public," and anyone interested in natural science had to have Latin. Thus, scientists wrote their works in Latin. Jacob Bernoulli published Ars conjectandi in 1713, and Carl Friedrich Guass, who lived into the 19th century, wrote in Latin. According to Waquet, Isaac Newton not only wrote most of his works in Latin, but he also had more books in Latin than in English in his library, and he annotated the Latin books he read in Latin. Descartes' Meditations were originally in Latin, written "mainly for scholars."

For reasons of dissemination scholars also commissioned translations of their works into Latin. Examples include Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning and Descartes' Passions de l'âme. It seems odd to us today that educated Frenchmen did not know English, but it was the case. Galileo's Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi achieved greater circulation in its Latin edition of 1653 than in the original. Similarly, Robert Boyle's fame on the continent was due to the translation of his writings in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland.

The first achievement in the development of vernacular literature in Europe was Dante's Commedia, and Dante himself wrote a defense of vernacular literature -- in Latin! -- entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia (1305). It was the French, however, particularly during the reign of Louis XIV, who really began to cultivate French as a literary language, and by the end of the 17th century it was on the way to becoming the established language of diplomacy.

As I have described it, the Quarrel concerned throwing off the fetters of past learning, much of it thought to be false, especially in light of the discoveries of science. But Waquet's book has illuminated the "paternal" burden imposed on the learned and the literate by the Ancients and the concomitant desire of the Moderns to forge their own literary destiny. After all, even the fiercest Modern, Charles Perrault, was also a distinguished scholar of Latin and Greek. Still, in the age of Perrault and Boileau, some writers continued to publish in Latin, for instance, the Scots poet George Buchanan, seen here in the engraving on the title page of the 1676 edition of his work, which included paraphrases of the Psalms and Latin translations of Euripides' Medea and Alcestis.

Goethe offers an interesting example of the transition in letters in Germany in the 18th century. All of the major German poets up to his time were very able classicists. These included, near him in time, Klopstock and Lessing, who were products of famous schools whose curriculum focused on classical studies. Goethe, however, had a rather unusual upbringing for a German poet. He hardly went to school at all, aside from a few early years. Instead, both he and his sister were educated at home by various instructors under the eye of their father.

Goethe did learn Latin, just as he learned English, French, and Italian with private tutors. Though Waquet writes that he "became a good Latinist," and he even writes in his autobiography that he was able to converse "fluently" in Latin when he studied in Strassburg, he was no Latinist of the likes of Lessing or Klopstock. The five-volume Der Junge Goethe, which covers Goethe's oeuvre from 1757 to 1775, begins with his "Labores Juveniles," 62 pages of his youthful translations of Latin (and even some Greek) into German and vice versa. I am not really competent to judge the excellence of his Latin translations, but the English and French of his letters to his sister Cornelia, when he was a student in Leipzig, show that he was not too exact. He got across what he wanted to say, but he was no scholar. Indeed, Goethe proudly said that about himself, or he had Werther say something to that effect.

There are many interesting things in Waquet's learned volume. Two interesting tidbits: Croatia still harbored "remarkable Latin poets well into the 19th century," and a former president of Colombia, Miguel Antonio Caro, was also an exceptional poet in Latin. Poking around online I discovered that the so-called Gradus ad Parnassum (1659), which Waquet calls "that indispensable tool of all school versifiers," is available from an Indian distributor, which must indicate that Latin is still entrenched in the former British colonies. And I was particularly intrigued by this title page of a rare book by the Swiss Orientalist Hottinger, published in 1651 by Johann Jacob Bodmer, the father of one of my current research interests.

Picture credit: Philadelphia Rare Books and Manuscript Company

Taste in Art

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is no accounting for taste, whether it be in matters of culinary delight or works of art. In other words, taste is individual and subjective. Nonetheless, we all imagine, because we like a movie or a book, that others should share our preferences. In other words, we think everyone else should respond the same way. Thus, we say to a friend, after seeing Notting Hill (recently viewed in Goethe Girl's antediluvian household), "It's enjoyable," meaning "I enjoyed it, and you will, too." Indeed, we don't ask friends who have seen a certain play whether they liked it but, rather, "Is it good?" Such reactions suggest that our judgment is self-evidently correct.

Taste, especially in connection with art, occupied thinkers in the 18th century. The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns had brought about the recognition that "modern" works were to be evaluated according to criteria different from those for classical works. Certainly taste was individual, but what, it was asked, was the basis of our judgments? Are they simply spontaneous, emotional reactions, as was declared by the Jean Baptiste DuBos? According to this French man of letters: "Whether a work is stirring and makes the right impression on us is something our own emotional responses can tell us better than all the treatises of the judges of art." DuBos called this inner feeling a "sixth sense," or "je ne sais quoi."

Others, however, especially in Germany, were opposed to such intangibles and sought to put taste on a firmer footing. Johann Christoph Gottsched, for instance, the Leipzig literary arbiter (looking very much here like the "literary pope" he was accused of being), disagreed that the appreciation of the public for a play was of any account in judging it. He insisted that, for taste to be defensible, there had to be an element of considered reason in our judgments. German men of letters, particularly in the early part of the 18th century, were well aware that Germany lacked a great literary tradition, and Gottsched in particular took it as his role in life to help in the founding of a great national literature. The role of a critic like himself was to elevate the taste of the German public. (That taste is also a function of the time in which we live is evident in Gottsched's own choices: he placed Corneille above Shakespeare.)

Gottsched believed (and here I am following Peter Hohendahl's A History of German Literary Criticism) that the beauty of a work of art resided in its perfect organization, which could be objectively analyzed. As he wrote in Critische Dichtkunst: "The exact relation, the order and symmetry of all the parts of which a thing is composed, is the source of all beauty." And, further, "The pleasure of the observer of such a work is rooted in the work's purposiveness, which can be demonstrated by means of poetic laws." In turn, these rules "are merely a healthy Reason's expression of what is proper, what is fitting (or not) in a work of art."

One hears already, in that word "purposiveness" a foreshadowing of Kant. For Kant, too, taste was subjective, but he would go on to separate beauty from the object itself. Thus, he held that there are no objective principles or rules by which we can judge the Beautiful; Beauty exists only in relation to our subjective response to an object. At the same time, Kant gave philosophic grounding to the feeling that we all have, namely, that everyone should react with the same enthusiasm (or dislike) vis-a-vis a work of art.

He did this in a very interesting manner, by insisting that, to be legitimate, judgments of taste must be "disinterested." He thus excluded the pleasures of eating and other sensuous delights from the aesthetic realm; he also excluded any moral considerations. The "Good," after all, is something we desire and in which we may therefore be said to have an "interest." Beauty, however, is what pleases universally and without interest. When we judge something to be beautiful, we impute our pleasure to everyone else. Aesthetic judgments are thus normative, meaning that we think everyone else should think as we do.

"Disinterest" means that we have no horse in the race, whereas pleasure (as in food) and the good are things in which we have interest and want for ourselves.

Whatever their implications for works of art, it seems to me that Kant's ideas are much more applicable to a modern phenomenon, namely, "feeling the pain of others." To feel the pain of others -- whether of the homeless or the victims of Darfur -- is to have an aesthetic reaction. I call it aesthetic because the homelessness or whatever is not something I experience myself; in other words, I do not feel the actual pain. Thus, I am in principle "disinterested"; I have no horse in the race. At the same time, I believe that everyone else should share my reaction, whether it be outrage, sadness, etc. I am sure that all of us have had the experience of encountering people the correctness of whose opinions (add your own favorite contentious social or political topic) is absolutely self-evident to them. Because they feel deeply, so we should, too. Interestingly, if you ask them to give you specific reasons for their judgments, you will discover that there is a "je ne sais quoi" quality about them. Politics has become aestheticized.

In defense of what might seem my cold-heartedness, I would submit that feeling doesn't suffice to change the condition of those in need of our help in the world. For that we have to dig in and do our part, based on what Gottsched would have called a reasoned, objective assessment of what stirs our emotions, which might then lead to decisions about our capacity to help.

Picture credits: Nature; Scott Suchman; Karen Prinsloo

The Notion of Progress

Paul Kristeller, in an essay on the history of aesthetics, writes that philosophers and other thinkers did not problematize the sensuous reception of works of art before the 18th century. I think something similar can be said about men's reactions to works of nature, whether they were perceived as beautiful or as catastrophic.

In pre-modern times, the natural world was the place in which people lived and labored. If they "enjoyed" nature -- for instance, a sunny day in spring after a long, harsh winter -- it was as a respite from the challenge of living and working in a tough world. Life was more or less regulated by natural rhythms, except perhaps in the case of scholars like Faust, who inhabited dusky, damp chambers.

The discoveries of science in the 17th century led some men to reflect on the world around them in a new way, both the natural world and the larger cosmos. They speculated about "nature," which differed from the speculations of earlier thinkers, both ancient and of medieval thinkers, for whom the natural world was an imperfect realm under heaven. Their reflections were limited, for there was simply no way they could peer into nature's workings. No instruments, no telescopes, and all their experimentation seems to us today like nothing more than hocus pocus.

Medieval philosophy was much ridiculed, especially in the 18th century, for such lucubrations as the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. People were smart in earlier ages, but, outside of agriculture and weaponry, knowledge had little practical application. Goethe's Faust, though a "doctor," laments that his cures have caused as much harm as good. The scene of Faust in his study in the opening of Goethe's play highlights the seeming futility of the medieval scholar's desire for knowledge.

The scientific discoveries of the 17th century, however, had worldly relevance. If the discoverers themselves -- Galileo, Descartes -- limited their view to their scientific fields, other men were quick to see the possibility of application in the real world. The discovery of the circulation of the blood, for instance, promised the possibility of action and of change. If men had earlier endured the natural world, now they saw its imperfections and resolved no longer to suffer or endure them, but to change the world.

The notion of progress in human affairs seems to have taken hold by the end of the 17th century. The scientific discoveries of the 17th century led to what Alexander Koyré (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe) has called a "radical spiritual revolution," including the jettisoning of the Christian concern with one's eternal life and its replacement by "the secularization of consciousness" and preoccupation with this life and the present world. Of course, Descartes and Galileo had no such purpose; they were both good Christian men, as were Copernicus and Kepler.

But the rejection of the scientific authority of the past was soon transformed by men of letters into a rejection of the cultural and artistic achievements of the past. A first phase in this was the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns on which I have been posting.

The sublime -- I am getting there! -- is part of this opening phase. And isn't the photo of the Andromeda Island Nebula sublime?

Picture credit: Astronomy Picture of the Day

Ancients and Moderns

I keep wanting to articulate my thoughts concerning the sublime, as I work on my paper for the German Studies Association conference, but "sublime" is a multivalent term to put it mildly. Benedetto Croce was being ironic when he wrote that "the sublime is anything that has been or shall be called sublime by those who have used or shall use this word." In order to talk about the pre-Kantian sublime (the subject of the GSA panel), I have had to excavate the term from the long history of its use since the late 17th century.

The term emerges in the context of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, on which I recently posted. Here is some background on that "quarrel."

Back in 1649 Descartes wrote (in his treatise concerning "the passions of the soul") that "what the ancients have taught us is so scanty and for the most part so lacking in credibility that I may not hope for any kind of approach toward truth except by rejecting all the paths which they have followed." Talk about doubt! The ancient authorities he was speaking of included, e.g., Aristotle's physics. Already in the 16th century, Copernicus had overturned the most ancient conceptions about our privileged place in the universe.

(And it has gone downhill from there for us humans!)

The application of the discoveries of science and technological innovation in the course of the 18th century would confirm that the world of nature was an ordered one that could be rationally understood and manipulated in ways that would result in not just change but in the transformation of the earth. It was the birth era of the doctrine of progress in knowledge.

This emancipation from inherited knowledge would not stop with the natural sciences. In the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, at the end of the 17th century in France, the disdain for the past extended to the past itself. Expressing a triumphalism concerning the achievements of his own glorious age (that of Louis XIV), Charles Perrault wrote that "the princes of Homer's age resemble modern peasants." Moreover, he asserted, Homer would have been a better poet had he lived in the age of the Sun King.

Not everyone was sure that progress could be made in the arts as it could in the sciences. Another Modern, Fontenelle, the proselytizer of Newton in France, thought that only certain fields allowed of progress: "physics, medicine, mathematics, which are composed of numberless ideas and depend upon precision of thought which improves with extreme slowness, yet is always improving."

Throughout the 18th century, thinkers and artists struggled with the relevance of the past to the present. Indeed, what was at stake was the entire Western intellectual inheritance -- not only the legacy of the classical world but also, as would be apparent, the Christian heritage. Some writers, such as Winckelmann, praising the supposed "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the Greeks, sought to make antiquity relevant for the present. He in turn would have much influence on Goethe and on Weimar classicism. The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns would be replayed in Germany in the last years of the 18th century in two important treatises: Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry and Friedrich Schlegel's On the Study of Greek Poetry.

And then there occurred a turn against the triumphalism of the school of progress, against the notion that the rationalism that powered scientific and technological advance could be applied to the workings of the human psyche. Among the German Romantic writers there was something like a wave of conversions to Roman Catholicism, for instance, Dorothea Schlegel, wife of Friedrich, née Brendel Mendelssohn, oldest daughter of the Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

Longinus's treatise on the sublime, beginning with Boileau's translation in 1674, had a powerful influence on the emergence of "aesthetics" in the 18th century, which finalized the separation of the arts from the sciences. With this "pre-history" I think I may be ready to start writing about the sublime.

Picture credit: The Virtual Philosophy Club; The Technium

Goethe and Translation

The history of Western literature until the 17th century exhibits a deference to earlier models, primarily those of antiquity. Ernst Robert Curtius, in European Literature and the Middle Ages, portrays the laborious transmission of the legacy of antiquity through the so-called Dark Ages, culminating in the recovery of works of poets, philosophers, and natural scientists in the Renaissance. Whether churchmen or humanists, writers displayed their "legitimacy" as men of letters by tracing their literary debt to earlier writers. It was a "family" thing. A vivid exemplification is Dante's Commedia, in which the Roman poet Virgil leads the Florentine (portrayed above by Delacroix) on his journey through hell and purgatory.

The break in this attachment to tradition, to what went before, occurred quite rapidly in the 17th century and was given expression in the philosophical system of Descartes, which introduced systematic doubt about all inherited knowledge. Cartesianism provided the philosophical framework for the emerging natural sciences, which proceeded on the principle that all the scientific knowledge inherited from antiquity was questionable. By dispensing with what ancient authors had written about physics (Aristotle) or the body (Galen) or the physical universe (Ptolemy), 17th-century scientists revolutionized our understanding of the material world.

After unmasking the supposed scientific ignorance of the ancients, the 17th century next set its sights on the literary achievements of antiquity, especially Homer. This was the so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, set off by a panegyric of Charles Perrault, he of fairytale fame. (Cinderella at left, by Carl Offterdinger.) As Douglas Lane Patey has written (in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism), Perrault attacked the coarse language of the Homeric epics, Homer's indecorous heroes, the indecency of the gods, the outdated science, and all the trivial and repetitious details. Superficially the quarrel was about literature; at stake was the notion of "progress." Clearly the Moderns were the winners.

Yet it was even recognized at the time that the arts -- whether literary or visual -- were not quantifiable in the same way as was, for instance, the circulation of the blood or the movement of the planets around the sun. Thus, in a second phase of the Quarrel, the proponents of the superiority of ancients based their defense on the agreeableness of the very historical and cultural difference and strangeness of the works of ancient authors. They thus began to relativize the notion of universal values. This phase of the Quarrel took place in the early 18th century, with Anne Dacier squaring off against Antoine Houdar de la Motte (what names these French guys had!). Madame Dacier, besides editing or translating important classical or Hellenistic texts -- Sappho, the plays of Aristophanes and Terence, Callimachus, Anacreon -- introduced France to Homer with her 1699 translation of the Iliad. In her preface she responded to the Moderns (I am following Patey here) as follows:

I find ancient times more beautiful as they resemble ours less. What pleases me in Chinese is Chinese manners ... If the heroes of Homer's age do not resemble those of our own, that difference should give us pleasure.

She went on to say that a poet was a representative of his time, and that translations should not elide this difference:

In a word, the poet imitates what is, not what came into being only later. Homer could not have embodied the custom of later centuries; it is for later centuries to recapture the customs of his.

Houdar de la Motte knew no Greek but nevertheless rendered the Iliad in verse (in contrast to Madame Dacier's prose) in 1714, reducing the epic to twelve books and took the liberty, as he wrote in his defense, "to change what I thought disagreeable" in the epic. In other words, he sought to make a work palatable that was otherwise hard to digest for the tastes of the French 18th century. He called his rendering an "imitation," not a translation.

As Patey points out the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns resonated throughout the 18th century -- the English version is called the Battle of the Books -- and can be found in essays of the 1790s of Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel. Goethe himself does not address the Quarrel per se, but his encomium on Wieland in 1813, in which he proposes two "maxims" for translation, would almost seem to be reiterating the varying positions of Anne Dacier and Houdar de la Motte:

One [maxim] demands that the author of a foreign land be carried over to us [zu uns herüber gebracht] in such a way that we can regard him as one of our own. The other, on the other hand, requires that we travel to the stranger [uns zu dem Fremden hinüber begeben] and place ourselves in his circumstances and speech, discover his peculiarities.

Later, in the Notes to the West-East Divan, Goethe wrote of three methods of translation. This was in about 1814, as he was entering into the period that marked the incipient beginnings of his concept of world literature. He no longer speaks of the "stranger," but of the "foreign land." The first of the three methods makes the foreign land familiar according to our own way of thinking [uns in unserm eigenen Sinne mit dem Auslande bekannt]. In the second, one indeed attempts to place oneself in the circumstances of the foreign land, but really is only concerned with appropriating [aneignen] the foreignness [fremden Sinn] and portraying it according to our own way of thinking [mit eigenem Sinne]. In the third -- the highest -- the translation attempts to be identical with the original.

Picture credits: Romanticism in Art; the Odysseus Gallery