Goethe and Beethoven

I think it's time to devote some attention to Goethe again. It has been a while, but my excuse is my involvement in two projects -- the free speech volume and the GSA panel on the pre-Kantian sublime -- that have taken me away from Goethe. Still, he turns up in unexpected ways, in daily life, at least in my daily life.

Last evening during pre-prandial libations Rick was bragging that he had just purchased (through iTunes) the complete Beethoven symphonies for $6.00. The symphonies were performed by the Tblisi Symphony Orchestra. ("Tblisi is a real city," he insisted when I laughed. "It has 500,000 people." He also reminded me that Louisville, where I grew up, once had a world-class orchestra. He also reminded me that the mid-size cities of the former Soviet Union produced orchestras that do a good job on these "war horses": Kiev, Rostock, etc.)

It is well known that Goethe had conservative tastes in music. Indeed, he had an aversion to Beethoven's music, though he did value Beethoven as a person. They met in July of 1812 at the spa Teplitz, where Beethoven had gone hoping for a cure for his growing deafness. In his novel Immortality Milan Kundera has memorably recreated an incident recounted by Bettina von Arnim in which Goethe and Beethoven, out for a walk, came upon the Austrian empress Maria Ludovica and her entourage. According to Bettina, who said she had the story from Beethoven himself, Goethe doffed his hat, while Beethoven pulled his own hat deeper over his face. And then, after the royals had passed, Beethoven bawled Goethe out for his subservience.

Bettina didn't report this story until 1832, the year of Goethe's death, and it is generally felt that Bettina used Beethoven as a mouthpiece for her own liberalism. Nevertheless, it is true that Goethe was very respectful when it came to the "old political order." By 1812 he had spent almost forty years in Weimar. The French Revolution had of course undermined, but not destroyed, this order, and within two years the Congress of Vienna would thwart many of the liberal impulses that inspired Beethoven and, indeed, the Romantic generation in Germany.

According to the Goethe Handbuch, Goethe first heard an aria of Beethoven in 1807, without, however, knowing who the composer was. Until 1810, when E.T.A. Hoffmann (a composer himself as well as a writer) wrote a review of the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven was practically unknown in north or central Germany. Mostly he was known for his virtuoso piano artistry. He became a cult taste among professionals, however, and also among Romantic poets. It was in 1810 that Bettina forced her way into his presence in Vienna. (Kundera's novel also recreates the meeting of Beethoven and Bettina. The painting here of the young composer indicates why she might have been infatuated with him.). Beethoven, who had been studying Goethe's poetry, had just finished composing several songs as well as his Egmont score, based on Goethe's play of 1787. Bettina encouraged him to write to Goethe, which he did, and he received a polite response from Goethe. He also heard some of Beethoven's piano works, but, according to the Goethe Handbuch, was at a loss as to what to make of them.

In letters to his wife, Goethe reported of meeting Beethoven in Teplitz and of hearing him play the piano. Later he wrote to Zelter, the composer and intimate friend: "His talent astonished me; unfortunately he is a totally unconstrained personality." Goethe was indeed impressed with Beethoven as a musician and as a person. Later Egmont was performed in Weimar, as was Fidelio. Still, as the Goethe Handbuch reports, the new instrumental music was foreign to him and also sinister (unheimlich). As he wrote to Sulpiz Boisserée in 1811, "It wants to encompass everything and instead always looses itself in the elemental" (das will alles umfassen und verliert sich darüber immer ins Elementarische). This echoes his reaction to the destruction produced by the French Revolution, the descent into chaos in its attempt to recreate the world anew. During the last years of his life he often listened to Beethoven's piano music, without being able to get over his feeling of alienation from it. Felix Mendelssohn played the first movement of the Fifth Symphony for him in 1830.

Listening to the Third and the Fifth last evening I could recognize that Goethe would have been turned off by the driving impulse of the music. Just as Goethe was living on the cusp of a change in political history, so, too, was he present for this transition in music. Beethoven represented a great leap forward, not yet in the First and Second symphonies, which are very Haydn-like, but by the Third Symphony Beethoven could be said to have "become" Beethoven. According to Rick, the Third was long and hard for the public to appreciate, but it soon got the point, and, ever after, musicians were no longer like Mozart and Hayden, but were like Beethoven. Much to Goethe's chagrin.

Picture credits: Posters Guide; picture-alliance/dpa

Freedom of Speech

The volume on the historical origins of freedom of speech was inspired, so to speak, by the Mohammed cartoons protests of 2006. As I write the conclusion to the volume, Americans are protesting the construction of the "Ground Zero mosque." There are also Koran burnings. Time to weigh in on these issues.

In both cases -- the Muslims and the Americans -- people are exercising their right to voice their opinions. What is remarkable, however, is the asymmetry in the reaction of the West's intellectual class to the two protests. The Muslims: well, they are "offended," and we have to respect their sensibilities. The Americans: well, they are intolerant and racist and Islamophobic to boot.

The Indian-born British writer Kenan Malik asserts that the protests of Muslims, starting with the Rushdie affair, have been politically motivated by the most conservative elements in the Islamic world. Speaking of himself as a young man before the Rushdie affair, in the 1980s, Malik writes that "radical" in a Muslim context meant someone who was a militant secularist, who challenged the power of the mosques. The Rushdie affair, however, took place at a time when the left, disenchanted with secularism, began buying into the multicultural politics of ethnic particularism. The result has been the undermining of "progressive trends" within Muslim communities and the strengthening of the hand of religious fundamentalists.

He also blames journalists, who like to find the most extreme figure to quote. Thus, the fundamentalists have become the "real Muslims," in contrast to the vast numbers who have come to the West in order to live a better life and to escape from the fundamentalist politics that Middle Eastern rulers manipulate to keep themselves in power.

Such an assessment is what many of us have suspected. He doesn't go so far as to label the confrontation between the West and Islamic fundamentalism a continuation of the confrontation of world powers of the Cold War, though I think there is an element of that.

Such politics aside, what interests me is the reaction of Western intellectuals at this time. As I have said before, free speech is in crisis, precisely because the Western intellectual class is no longer is confident of its own principles. Should I say that they are pusillanimous? Since the 18th century progress has been defined by eroding the values that people most cherish, staring with religion. It was a sign of "open-mindedness" to be "tolerant" of attacks on one's pieties. Art -- painting, theater, movies, etc. -- has become a principle vehicle for spreading open-mindedness. When Catholics in New York protested in 1999 against paintings by Chris Ofili, freedom of speech was naturally invoked by the ACLU and others, and the exhibition went on.

As Kenan Malik points out, however, you cannot find a theater director in Europe today who would put on a performance of Voltaire's Mahomet. Random House, "publishing giant," backed out of publishing The Jewel of Medina, a romantic tale about Aisha, the Prophet's youngest wife. (By the way, it was a university professor who alerted Random House about the "offensive to Muslims" nature of the novel.) When a museum in Holland decides to remove an exhibition of photos of gay men wearing masks of Mohammed, the left-wing Dutch newspaper praises the museum for its "great professionalism." Imagine that response had the Brooklyn Museum canceled its exhibit of Chris Ofili's paintings!

One might think that intellectuals and the media have tied themselves in knots over free speech because they are uncomfortable with dissent. (See Rousseau's general will.) Maybe it is more the case that they are uncomfortable with dissent from their opinions. Ordinary Americans, however, are showing that freedom of speech isn't limited to the ruling class. (I love the superiority of this site, showing "the most ignorant Ground Zero mosque signs." Note that ignorance is not defined; it is simply assumed that the sentiments are signs of ignorance. Compare the signs with the picture above: I don't think Americans can be said to have a corner on "ignorance.")

(People have complimented me for the images on this blog. For the subject of freedom of speech, however, I have really been challenged, since the relevant images are generally so unattractive and don't fit with those on other postings. Thus, I chose here the opposite sentiment and the picture at the top by artist Nancy Glazier.)

Do We Still Remember?

Freedom of Speech

I am encountering trouble with my conclusion to the free speech volume. I write a couple of what seems to be pretty good pages; then, there is a wall. Let me put down a few things, which may help me move forward.

I start out by making the claim that freedom of speech, before it was a legal right, was an essential part of the West's material progress. It was in the 17th and 18th centuries that the philosophes sought to crack the monopoly on "the word" held by church and crown by demanding the right to discuss the findings of the new "natural science."

The prohibitions were strongest in the outlying parts of Europe. For instance, Peter the Great forbade everyone in the Russian realm, excluding religious teachers, from writing behind locked doors. In Spain, the Inquisition was still in effect. The French crown also presided over a variety of prohibitions and regulations. Nevertheless, the tide of scientific and technical knowledge that began to sweep Europe could not be held back. Even Peter the Great wanted to "modernize."

The new knowledge, however, also freed people from their ties to authority and tradition and eroded the power of kings. Thus, there arose a body of doctrine concerning the rights of individuals, which now finds expression in the liberal constitutions of the West.

It is the combination of the two -- a body of shared values embodied in legal instruments and a standard of living that is historically unprecedented -- that has created what can be called a "cultural product."

It seems to me that this cultural product, including freedom of speech, is in crisis today. A defense of freedom of speech and indeed of other civil rights -- is challenged in the non-Western world and even within the West itself. The West now stands accused, like European monarchs of old, of monopolistic behavior in the matter of rights.

In presiding over this volume on the history of freedom of speech in the 18th century, I have made the argument that, in a "multicultural world," the West's rights, as stated above, are a specific cultural product. Thus, the volume does not take a position on the rightness or wrongness of freedom of speech as it currently exists in the West, nor does it plead for limiting or expanding the right in the interest of social comity or truth, respectively. Instead, I readily acknowledge the postmodernist view of cultural relativism.

The problem seems to be that the West has considered its rights "universal," i.e., applicable to all people at all times and in all places. But, as Jeremy Benthem said of natural rights, the doctrine was "from beginning to end so much flat assertion." It is this presumption of universality that has drawn the animus of critics. Islam, after all, also claims universality for its doctrines, and many of its adherents believe these are self-evident. But Islam, like other "world" religions, are also powerful traditional, institutional entities.

Since the 17th century the West's "thinking class" has had a problematic relationship to religion. The image to the left expresses what many philosophes thought in the 17th and 18th centuries and also reveals how their thinking has filtered down to popular culture. This rejection is also part of the "cultural product" I am describing. Thus, Europe and America increasingly seek to expunge the presence of religion from the public square. For instance, schools in traditional Catholic regions -- Poland, Bavaria -- are now being forced to remove religious symbols from the classrooms. But religion is part of the cultural inheritance of the West, and if Europe will not take its religious inheritance seriously, why would the new populations, be they Muslim or otherwise, be respectful of Europe's secular values?

More later.

Picture credits: ECHR blog; Memo; Louay Safi; Shorty Carranza; Sodahead

Freedom of Speech

Well, I am back to the free speech volume, officially entitled "Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea," writing the conclusion. If anyone has bothered to read long-ago posts, you will know that the volume was inspired by the Mohammed cartoons controversy several years ago. At that time, as chair of the Seminar on 18th-Century European Culture at Columbia, I organized a series of talks on the historical origins of free speech, since it struck me that no one was defending this freedom on what seemed to me a self-evident basis: namely, because it is OUR freedom. It's like defending your children, no matter how bad they are. Haven't we all seen a TV news reports of some horrible crime by a hoodlum, and the mother, trotted out for the camera, swears up and down that he is a good boy who could not have done what he is accused of? If only our university professors would defend Western "values" with such vigor. Against all the postmodernists who say that all cultures are equivalent, I counter: "Maybe, but this is the culture that I live in. If it's between me and them, then I want us to win." What also struck me at the time of the cartoons controversy was that postmodernists had such an easy time poking holes in the argument that rights were "universal."

In a sense I would say they are universal, applicable to all peoples at all times, since I believe that most people would prefer to have rights. Look at the Iranian protesters. As they have discovered, however, and despite all the U.N. proclamations, rights don't grow on trees. The rights we enjoy in the West have been historically achieved. But we have forgotten that centuries-long process and succumbed to the belief that there is something inevitable about rights. Thus the series I organized, and the book to be published, which contains essays by different scholars on aspects of the debates concerning speech in the 18th century.

It may be that all great civilizations imagine that their values are universal. Certainly Islam does. So, too, do the Chinese. But both of those civilizations have histories that they draw on to sustain their challenge to universality. Only in the West do we imagine that our history is evil, for instance, the Crusades: I mean, weren't Europeans only trying to reclaim a part of the world that had been Christian until the Muslim armies conquered it? Instead, we like to imagine that there are abstract universal truths. No doubt this belief has much to do with the fact that the scientific revolution began in the West, and science is ahistorical.

But there are precedents in the West itself for a belief in universal values. One element was the Roman empire, which at its height ruled a vast multi-cultured realm on which it stamped the name of Rome. Though Rome was generally content to leave its subjects to their own gods, provided they paid their taxes, there were rewards to Roman citizenship for its far-flung citizens. Certainly the elite classes of the empire, especially those in its outposts, were drawn to Rome's universality. The other element was Christianity. Though few Christian thinkers entertained the notion that men's earthly conditions could be made equal, all men were regarded as equal in the eyes of the Creator. In addition, Rome itself, whether the center of imperial or Christian power, was dependent for its administration and culture on a class of men who saw themselves as inheritors of a unified intellectual and spiritual legacy.

One should not underestimate the impress of this universalist vision on the intellectual life of early modern Europe, especially on the radical philosophes who were products of the institutions created by the earlier empire. As with the ancients, these men were cosmopolitans, "citizens of the world." Thus, their defense of freedom of speech did not appeal to facts on the ground, namely, native traditions or native history. Instead, they rejected this legacy and projected their universalist vision onto the future. For these modern cosmopolitans, history and tradition were reservoirs of bad practices that had to be overcome in the name of progress.

If we are to defend our rights against those who would impose other systems (communism; sharia), it's time to turn away from Kant and return to Herder, to history and culture.

Picture credit: Liberating Wings

Out-of-body experiences

This photo shows a group of kayaking friends, on our return after a recent after-dark outing. I am in blue, to the right of Regina, who wears the headlight. It is strange to be out on the river after dark. I am rather night blind, don't like driving a car after dark. I keep comparing the return on the river to being in a sensory-deprivation tank. In the far distance were the perfectly visible lights of Manhattan and New Jersey, but I could see nothing in the near distance, except for the lights on the kayaks in front of me. I felt very confident in my paddling skills, but I could have been in outer space. It made me very aware of how much I depend on the sense of sight. I was reminded that Addison privileged sight in discussing the "primary pleasures of the imagination." In Spectator 411 he wrote: "Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses. It fills the Mind with the largest Variety of Ideas, converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in Action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments. "

The Sublime Style versus the Sublime of Nature

Longinus, back in the first century A.D., wrote that the sublime "is a certain eminence or perfection of language." It was in this sense that Boileau made a case for the importance of Longinus in his 1674 translation of the treatise On the Sublime. According to Edmund Burke, writing in 1757, however, the sublime is the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling. I have been doing research on this transition, from the sublime style to a psychological category, especially as it affects German philosophy. Bodmer and Breitinger certainly understood the sublime in terms of poetic effects, but ideas they introduced in their writings contributed to this turn toward aesthetic effect. These ideas principally came from England and Italy.

For instance, already in their Discourses of the Painters of the early 1720s, they emphasized the importance of imagination. They seem to have taken their ideas on imagination from Joseph Addison's Pleasures of the Imagination, which they read (along with John Locke) in French translation. Bodmer, in Discourse 19, wrote that the good poet is distinguished from the ordinary one by a well-cultivated imagination. He uses the word "Imagination" here, not the German term that he would later apply, Einbildungs-Kraft. If he is gifted with a rich imagination, as was Homer (or Bodmer and Breitinger's favorite, Martin Opitz), a poet can extract a subject from his imagination at will. He will be able to describe a battle, a storm at sea, or a quiet scene of love, as if he were actually there.

Everything Bodmer writes about Opitz's superiority in this respect can be found (almost literally) in Addison. Addison, for instance, says of imagination in Spectator 417:

It would be in vain to enquire, whether the Power of imagining Things strongly proceeds from any greater Perfection in the Soul, or from any nicer Texture in the Brain of one Man than of another. But this is certain, that a noble Writer should be born with this Faculty in its full Strength and Vigour, so as to be able to receive lively Ideas from Outward Objects, to retain them long, and to range them together, upon occasion, in such Figures and Representations as are most likely to hit the Fancy of the Reader. A Poet should take as much Pains in forming his Imagination, as a Philosopher in cultivating the Understanding. He must gain a due Relish of the Works of Nature, and be thoroughly conversant in the various Scenary of a Country Life.

I think the part of the above quote that struck Bodmer was "Figures and Representations as are most likely to hit the Fancy of the Reader." And, for Bodmer, a poet's expression of emotion or feeling is more natural when we feel the emotion than when we pretend to. On its face, Discourse 19 seems to suggest that a poet must have experienced the feelings that are represented in a poem. This is not, however, the poetry of experience of Herder or Goethe. If one reads closely, one sees that Bodmer, like Addison, recommends the reading of great works of literature as a method of enriching the poetic imagination. For instance, Addison, writing on "the Faculty of Taste" (Spectator 409), said that it "must in some degree be born with us," but that there were "several Methods for Cultivating and Improving it," the "most natural Method for this Purpose is to be conversant among the Writings of the most Polite Authors."

Despite this introduction into German letters of an "empirical" element, there is an almost total absence in the writings of Bodmer and Breitinger of real nature or even real, lived life. This absence comes out strongly if one compares Addison. It may be an English trait, the result of a long tradition of thinking about nature, but Addison is not being conventional when he writes about the beauties of the natural world that the poet appropriates. Addison also seems to have seriously considered the way the senses appropriate the world around us. For instance, in discussing the difference between the effect of round pillars and square ones in architecture, he writes (Spectator 415) that "the Fancy is infinitely more struck with the view of the open Air, and Skies, that passes through an Arch, than what comes through a square, or any other Figure." This tradition of "empirical observation" is really lacking in Bodmer and Breitinger and goes a long way to explaining the absence of any consideration in their writings of the Alps or other Swiss natural wonders, which the English had been writing about for at least half a century.

Photos: Arches National Park Utah; Allen Zumach Photo Art; U.K. Daily Mail