"The cosmopolitan spirit in literature"

The title of this post refers back to my previous post and to the book of that name by Joseph Texte, the late-19th-century French comparatist. As I wrote in the post, Texte used the concept of the "cosmopolitan spirit in literature" in the sense in which Fritz Strich would later speak of the "supranational" development of a "European spirit" in literature. As Strich wrote, literary commerce  between and among  the various nations of the continent played a leading role in this development. He cited the same cultural manifestations in European cultural history. For instance, Gothic architecture can be found in Germany, France, Italy, England, Spain, and Prague. Similarly Baroque art. Yet, this manifestation began in one place before it was borrowed and transformed by another country. Thus, there is a temporal difference in the appearance of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, and so on.

For Strich each nation had a specific mission in the development of this "spirit" of Europe, and its contribution "reveal[ed] its own innermost character." E.g., France bequeathed to Europe the rule of reason, "transcending any place, any time," yet "this rational spirit of French literature [was] also a very national spirit." The French classical spirit dominated the arts until Germany found its moment and, with Romanticism, carried other nations before it in breaking the bonds imposed by the regimentation of classicism.

Strich modifies somewhat the "ethnological" aspect of Texte's account of cosmopolitanism, and, in the article from which I have quoted him above, published in 1930, he also problematizes what is exactly meant by "European."

Leslie Stephen, ca. 1860,
before he was Virginia Woolf's father

Leslie Stephen, in his lengthy review of Texte's book in volume 4 (1909) of Studies of a Biographer, questions the notion of a "spirit," cosmopolitan or otherwise. He agrees that there has been, since the 17th century, a "tacit freemasonry between the higher classes" and that the "cosmopolitan spirit was the product of the innumerable causes which were bringing nations into closer intercourse at their higher levels." He argues, however, that it was not Rousseau, but Voltaire, who proclaimed the new alliance between the French and English "mind." His achievement was to acquaint the French with the philosophy and science of the Englishmen Locke and Newton. But philosophy and mathematics, as Stephen writes, are not especially English. Nevertheless, Voltaire concluded that Britons were philosophers because they were "free" men, resolved "to think as they pleased and to say what they thought." But freedom is not necessarily in the particular "character" of any nation, even the English. In fact, only a generation earlier the French had considered the English more savage "than its own mastiffs" for killing its king.

In the end, Voltaire remained true to his French roots and to the Academy. The classical rules in art, according to Stephen, did not allow literary expression of the deepest subjects; that was the realm of religion. What Rousseau got from Richardson was the legitimacy for expressing sentiments directly. By introducing "enthusiasm" into French letters, however, Rousseau was engaging in genuine revolt against the established order, unlike Richardson, whose "frank utterance of common sentiments and freedom in dealing with common subjects" was not revolutionary in a country that had never possessed an Academy in the true sense.

In conclusion, Stephen criticizes what he calls this "scientific" approach to literature, the search for causes in the development of literary and artistic phenomena. Critics are always trying to trace origins, for instance, of "romanticism" and so on, and then speak

as though its first representative had made a discovery of a new product as a chemist discovers a gas which nobody had ever before perceived. Rousseau, or somebody else, has then the credit of all the subsequent developments, as Watt gets the credit of the steam engine. Each new critic pushes the origin a little further back, because in reality there is no origin but only a gradual change of form.

Picture credit: Science and Literature Reading Group

World literature again

Colbert Presenting the Members of the French Academy to the King in 1667

I am jumping back into world literature, after so much time away in the realm of utopia, especially as I am scheduled to give a paper on it on January 11 at the MLA in Chicago. In truth, utopia and world literature are not that far apart in the realm of ideas: both are proposals to create more harmony  and decrease animosities among peoples. Utopia, however, would halt the process of change, while world literature is about change and communication. It decidedly is not, as David Damrosch contends in , about great works of literature, those that have "an exceptional ability to transcend the boundaries of the culture that produces it." Thus, Homer and Sophocles, alongside the Kalidasa and The Tale of the Genji in "world literature" surveys.  Goethe's comments on world literature are not copious, but in none of them does he designate a particular work as a work of world literature.

A term that crops up frequently in my research in this connection is "cosmopolitanism." A couple of days ago I was taken aback when I came across a book from 1899 entitled Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature. This concept is not one I associate with Rousseau, and in fact I wrote a post on this subject earlier this year. Rousseau, as I wrote, loathed the very idea of cosmopolitanism, asserting that Germans, French, English, and so on all had the same taste and manners: they had become "Europeans."

The book, as I discovered, uses "cosmopolitan" in a different sense. It is by Joseph Texte, who was a professor of comparative literature at Lyon. For Texte, the "cosmopolitan spirit in literature" was the result of the embrace of the English canons of art by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La nouvelle Heloise  abandoned the normative classical ideals of the French Academy and introduced the more "barbarian" (in the view of the French) values of English literature, especially as seen in the homely, realist conventions of Samuel Richardson's novels.  This opened the floodgates to the reception of the "Nordic" spirit: The new content entering French literature by the 19th century was that of imagination and sensibility," definitely not a French product; they were of a northern cast and infused, as Madame de Staël expressed it, with "foreign vigour." The French developed an appetite for the foreign as a consequence of exposure to "northern" writers.

Madame de Staël by François Gerard (ca. 1810)

Texte defends his use of such racial categories. Since Taine, "the successor of Madame de Stael," the study of literature has become an "ethnological problem." What, after all, he asks, is an individual without his environment? "Dante without Italy? Could the works written in Latin be attributed to the Arabians or Chinese? Could the Alhambra be the work of the architect of the Parthenon? Each nation utters a portion of the 'interminable discourse' (Vigny) delivered by humanity." The discourse, he says, is interminable, but the nations have been participating in it for only a few centuries. He goes on to write something that is very redolent of Fritz Strich:

"'For the past eight or ten centuries there has been, in a sense, a traffic or interchange of ideas from one end of Europe to the other, so that Germany has been nourishing itself upon French thought, England upon German thought, Spain upon Italian thought, and each of these nations successively upon the thought of all the rest." 

Since my current work concerns the origins of Fritz Strich's views on Goethe and world literature, this book by Texte would seem to be part of these origins. Texte in his introduction thanks as his mentor Ferdinand Brunetière, whom I have already alluded to in an earlier presentation on this subject: In a long article in 1900,  Brunetière sketched the development of what he called "European literature," in particular the way in which the individual nations had developed a European literature on the soil of medieval Christianity and in particular antiquity, which he called "the master of Europe's mind and spirit." The great literatures of Europe developed successively (there are five: first, the Italians, followed by the Spanish, then the French, the English, and finally the Germans), with one after another manifesting "what were its most national and particular aspects," and each literature contributing to "the movement of European thought."

18th-century reflections

My immersion in the philosophes and the 18th century, in preparation for the conference on utopia in British Columbia, was so intense that I found it difficult to concentrate on any one aspect to post a blog about. Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot were racing around in my head. Having returned from the Pacific Northwest, however, I find it high time that I make an attempt to write regularly. But, first, some views of the conference.

That is me, dispensing jewels of wisdom to the audience. It was not an academic gathering, but instead drew many individuals from the Northwest and further afield who traveled with some difficulty to hear seven people talk about utopia. Sointula is on Malcolm Island, which in turn is off the coast of Vancouver Island, and it was via two planes and a ferry that I reached it. (The map of Vancouver Island above shows Sointula in the far upper-left corner, so you can see that it was not quite a direct flight from the Northeast.) The population is small (about 700), but the conference was organized and run by the most impressive corps of volunteers that the paid staff of the MLA could not match. I was very impressed with the attendees, all of whom showed a thirst to learn about the Sointula adventure (read more at that link) and about utopia, past and present.

Chuck LeWarne

Among the speakers was Chuck LeWarne, from whose books on Puget Sound and Washington state utopias I have learned much. In the corner of utopian settlement he has explored, he has shown how America has been a place of constant re-invention (see, for instance, this book by Chuck), something the 18th-century philosophes could hardly have imagined. Anyone who has read my posts on world literature will know why I think this is the case: capitalism and the free market seem to encourage people to constant novelty. In my last post I mentioned that Turgot had found novelty to be the basic human passion, one that impelled the innovators of history to break out of the rut of tradition and custom and propel humankind on its path to perfection. For Turgot and for many 18th-century philosophes, this passion was not envisioned in "embodied" terms, for instance, in the rise of fashion or the importation of new products to France, such as tea and coffee. It was an intellectual construct, like Reason.

Sointula library and museum

Where I stayed

Since my essay on Bodmer appeared (Goethe Yearbook, vol. 20), I have been struck by something that I only treated in passing in that essay, namely, the concept of novelty or "das Neue." Joseph Addison had included novelty in his analysis of the sublime, but Bodmer rejected it in that connection because novelty was concerned with the ephemeral and not, as as did the beautiful and the great in nature, with essential aspects of human nature. I use the latter term in full realization that its existence is now objected to in some quarters. Novelty is of course the deity that presides over the modern, no-holds-barred market. Before the 19th century utopia was limited to intellectual speculation, to literary works, but global trade and commerce allowed people to see themselves in a new light. Thus, the emigration to the Americas in that century of people wanting to create a "new" life.

Goethe, commerce, and world literature, part 3

"The Drunkard's Progress," by Nathaniel Currier (ca. 1846)

The word "progress" has always bothered me, in particular its application to the realm of morals. Its original connotations indicated nothing more than moving, as in going from one place to another, as in the sense of journeying or traveling. As anyone knows who has traveled, one can be worse off after a journey, say, after a 15-hour flight from San Francisco to Tokyo. One has, however, progressed. My compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary also notes "a state journey made by a royal or noble personage, or by a church dignitary." The notion of betterment can be seen in metaphorical usage, e.g., from Joseph Addison in 1713: "I am ashamed that I am not able to make further progress through the French tongue."

The original connotation of physical movement is nowadays rarely used in connection with progress. Instead, the word is applied to continuous "evolution" in morals or ethics. Thus, certain changes in human practices, e.g, the abolition of slavery or the extension of the suffrage to all citizens, including women, are always regarded as advances in our thinking: we correct our earlier mental errors. I am certainly not one to object to emancipation. After all, I have been a beneficiary of it.

What I object to is the self-congratulatory attitude of moderns and postmoderns, our belief that we are more enlightened than people in the past. My objection derives from our failure to recognize that all of our so-called moral achievements have been made possible by material progress, by the development of commerce and of capitalism. It has been the accumulating material enrichment of the West, beginning after the discovery of the New World, that has made us "open-minded." A world of paucity and scarcity made past generations less generous than we are in an age of affluence.

The one thing our tolerance does not extend to is the past, which also reflects the effects of capitalism: the market demands that we constantly abandon what we loved yesterday in favor of the "new" and "advanced." Our demand for novelty keeps the economy going and spreading "emancipation," but it also erodes our allegiance to what, from the point of view of a divine observer, might be considered truly worthwhile in human life. Joseph Schumpeter termed this process "the creative destruction of capitalism."

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-1781),
by Houdon (MFA, Boston)

Turgot, "the 18th-century Adam Smith," based his philosophy of progress on early 18th-century sensationalist theory of knowledge, which he adapted to posit as the basic human drive the desire "to innovate, to create novelty, to bring into being new combinations of sensations." This quote is from Frank Manuel's book The Prophets of Paris. Ignoring the paucity and scarcity of earlier ages, Turgot believed that traditional society had accepted "a changeless state of being as the greatest good," but that history showed, as Manuel writes, a battle between the spirit of novelty and the spirit of routine. In a wonderfully oxymoronic turn of phrase, Manuel writes that Turgot saw in human events the creation of "real, lasting, and enduring novelty." In his defense, Turgot was of course influenced by the discoveries in the natural sciences in the preceding decades, which represented an "accretion of scientific truth." His error was in applying scientific progress to the human moral and religious nature.

Here is where I get to my point about the blind spot of modern "progressive" thinkers. Turgot himself, the mentor of Condorcet, was a proponent of free trade and free commerce among men and nations. As Louis XVI's finance minister, he tried, but in vain, to eliminate traditional economic restrictions (guilds, royal protections of industries, monopolies, and so on), because they were barriers to the free movement of people into new occupations, and they also had the effect of determining prices of goods artificially. Economic freedom would lead to freedom as such. But people were already becoming free via commerce. As I mentioned in my last post, ordinary Dutch and the Englishmen were already enjoying new products.

Robe a la francaise, 1780,
by Isabelle de Borchgrave

I just read a fascinating article in this connection, by William H. Sewell Jr., which appeared in the February 2010 issue of the journal Past and Present. It is entitled "The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in 18th-Century France." Though Professor Sewell's focus is the textile trade, he draws on many studies of the rise of fashion, consumption, and luxury in the 18th century. Sewell's seeks to modify Marx's theory of labor value. He has the interesting (though, in my opinion, somewhat of a stretch) idea that "sartorial competition" in France, especially in silk garments, was actually a component of labor. The profits of silk producers were enhanced by what Sewell calls "the subsumption of consumer desire under capital," i.e., consumers were induced "to engage in unpaid labor that increased the value of their goods." Thus, unpaid "desire-generating labor," as much as the actual labor of producers, contributed to profits, as "elegantly turned-out consumers served ... as voluntary living advertisements for fashion goods and thus as spurs to further consumption by those who noticed and envied them."

The more interesting part for me concerns the effect of this trade on "progress": after all, the constant demand for novelty in the fashion market, at first on the part of noble patrons, led to a "steady expansion geographically outward and socially downward." In other words, people of the lower orders began wearing silks. "What was new in the late 17th and 18th century was the pronounced taste for novelty itself and the gradual democratization of status competition through consumption." People no longer wore what their parents and grandparents wore. "By the mid 18th century it was becoming difficult to read position in the social hierarchy from public bodily adornment." In the course of the 18th century cotton displaced linen among the poor, and consumption of silk increased among Frenchmen of all classes.

Detail of dress of Marie Antoinette,
paper creation by Isabelle de Borchgrave

Importantly, "the spread of fashion ... had potentially unsettling social and moral implications."

Turgot, so it seems to me, was correct in believing that the constant desire for novelty was a basic human passion. His mistake, however, was to believe that this was a mental or intellectual attitude that, absent the dead weight of the past, would continuously lead to the transformation of the human mind. While the acquisition of new scientific information has indeed led to a body of knowledge that is unlikely to be destroyed, this inheritance is not preserved in our genes or laid down in our arteries like cholesterol. As Turgot pointed out, and as Iran and North Korea today prove, even dictatorships (the Nazis perhaps excepted) are happy to make use of advances in technology and science.

As Manuel writes, Turgot the apostle of progress believed that mankind acquired knowledge in the same way as a newborn child. Each of us is aware of progress in one's individual life. It involves the accumulation of knowledge and experience, a process that is often halting and occasionally reversed. Doing well in school, saving money for later pleasures or retirement, and so on. Can such progress, however, be applied to the entire species? Isn't such progress something that has be re-created by each person and that is dependent to a great extent on how willing we are to avoid novelty (avoid getting tattoos) and, instead, to make use of the lessons of the past.

Well, I see I have gone on too long and have not yet got to Goethe and world literature. That is coming, however: there is a connection. Stay tuned.

Picture credits: Ludwig von Mises Institute; Penniless Press;

Goethe, commerce, and world literature, part 2

The prompting for the last post on the above subject was Adam Smith's work The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is earlier than The Wealth of Nations, which contains one of the most famous sentences of economic thinking:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens.

The use of the term self-interest has the connotation of selfishness, but Smith was not being hard-hearted. He was rather acknowledging that self connects with self in the modern world of commerce. His arguments for free trade were based not on the ruthlessness with which that term is now often associated. Smith believed that an open market -- free of guild regulations, which restrict labor and regulate prices, to the detriment of the public; free of special interests that through political means try to bend legislation to their own narrow advantage; free of lobbying; free of monopoly protection; and so on -- would be fairer, especially to the poorer classes who, especially in 18th-century France, were shackled by feudal restrictions. In an open market, we would instead negotiate for our fair "worth."

Worth here is economic, although there is naturally a moral sense, which Smith sought to ground in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book that is not about economics, but instead concerns the nature of relations between individuals in a secular society. Smith doesn't use that phrase, but he was writing about world in which everyday transactions would be guided by a new etiquette, one not derived from religious norms. As Emma Rothschild writes in her book Economic Sentiments "The traffic or commerce of modern life was ... a traffic in opinions." Her book is an examination of Smith and Condorcet and is concerned, as she writes, with the "discursive, reflective, self-conscious disposition, [which] is both a cause and a consequence of economic progress" (9). For Smith, the progress of affluence produced by commerce enfranchises opinions and sentiments. The negotiation in the market and in society are dependent on discourse.

Finally I am getting around to world literature, which is about the negotiations and discourse. Stay tuned.

Picture credits: Doctor Hermann; Coyote Blog

Goethe, commerce, and world literature, part 1

The Dutch Golden Age, by Anneke Hut

As indicted above, this is going to be a multi-part excursus on the above topics.

For some time now I have been linking Goethe's concept of world literature to the development of trade and commerce as these were taking place in the early 19th century, e.g., in this post. I was always struck by Goethe's use of terms like "Verkehr" and "Handel" in connection with world literature and also of his emphasis on the mutual relations between Germany and the other European countries. Intellectual commerce between these countries had been going on for centuries, leading by the early modern period to something like a sense of a common "European" mentality. Fritz Strich's study of Goethe and world literature portrayed this process as one of give and take. Thus, all the movements in art and literature -- Gothic, Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Romanticism -- were experienced by one and all, with one country starting the ball rolling and eventually being followed by the others. For Strich, the classical spirit was French, the Romantic German. This process could be called "discursive," in our contemporary use of the term.

The process of assimilation and transmission was the work of elites for whom the literary and artistic works of the past was a precious inheritance.  Artistic "legitimacy," to to speak, was conferred by the reflection in their own works of consanguinity with past models. They preserved in this way the memory of their progenitors.

Of course, one could be cynical and say that they had nothing else to value. It was, after all, a scarcity society, with wealth spread very unevenly. One could also say that this traditionalism was in the service of the state, the court, the church, etc., whose legitimacy was substantiated by the reverence to past authority.

And, indeed, by the 18th century, the past and its institutions were regarded more skeptically. Interestingly, it was the elites themselves who turned against the past. In the arts, the battle of the ancients and moderns contrasted the past and the present. Yet, the attacks went further, with the elites condemning the past as the source of all that was bad in society. For these attacks on tradition, in particular against the church and crown, the Enlightenment is seen as a period of moral progress.

Still Life by Willem Kalf (1619-1693)

Yet, one can also be cynical about the philosophes. One can say, for instance, that, in urging men to emancipate themselves from the authority of the past, they were likewise simply rationalizing the conditions on the ground. After all, the discovery of the New World and the breakthroughs in science offered opportunities for venturing outside of the traditional boundaries. In the 17th century already, Europe had begun to emerge from the agricultural cycle of feast and famine. In some places, notably England and Holland, ordinary people could begin to plan for the future. In particular, it was "goods," not "the Good," that began to liberate ordinary people: the presence of a teapot in imitation of Chinaware on the dinner table opened their eyes and their imagination to a wider world.

What could be the role of the intellectual elite in a world of commerce and trade? The elite was now faced with legitimating its own position in society. How to do that? Stay tuned.

Goethe and Saint-Simon

Pierre Joseph Proudhon by Courbet (1865)

I came to this topic of course through my readings on 18th-century utopianism, which is a lot about France. Throughout my research on this byway, I have tried to keep Goethe in mind. It was evident early on that he did not have the frame of mind of the French utopian thinkers, namely, the belief that humans were perfectible, given the "correct" social environment and education. Nevertheless, he did not ignore the ideas that were being mooted in response to the emerging social and economic problems of the early 19th century. He rejected the Romantic solution of withdrawal. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre represents his awareness of utopian settlements, yet, in contrast to the communities of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, his emigres are a self-selected group of men with the same occupations. This self-selection operated within the religious communities founded in the early 19th century in America, in particular those of German emigrants, with which he was familiar through, for instance, Prince Bernard's account of his American travels.

The bibliography of Johannes John's entry in the Goethe-Handbuch led me to the article "Goethes Verhältnis zum Saint-Simonismus im Spiegel seiner Altersbriefe" by Werner Kahle, which appeared in volume 89 (1972) of the Goethe-Jahrbuch. Professor Kahle was at the university of Jena, and it is not surprising in 1972 that he would place Goethe within a Marxist context. (In the same way, Goethe scholarship these days often reflects our own ideological tendencies, e.g., "the Green Goethe.") Thus, the subject of Kahle's 1963 publication (of 514 pages!) entitled Die Grundlinien der ideologischen Entwicklung Goethes im Spiegel seiner Brief: Ein Beitrag zum marxistischen-leninistischen Goethebild. As evidence for Goethe's sympathy with socialism, Kahle notes Faust's visions of the future in his last monologue as well as the Pedagogical Province in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, both of which reveal "a far-reaching affinity and agreement with the ambitions of French utopian socialism."

Aufbau der Republic by Max Lingner

Whatever Goethe's attitude was toward socialism, the opening of Professor Kahle's article makes an interesting point about Goethe's intellectual openness: "In a time of dark reactionary politics and intellectual suspicion, a retired civil servant of high standing in a German dukedom concerns himself with undisguised sympathy with an extremely progressive social teaching, with an important branch of utopian socialism: this, for German conditions, was extraordinary and at the same time greatly characteristic of Goethe's fundamental unbiased disposition in viewing the world" (vorurteilslose weltanschauliche Grundhaltung).

I can't help thinking how that comment could have applied to Professor Kahle's own situation in the DDR, where open-mindedness to a non-Marxist point of view would have been not only extraordinary but also quite dangerous. As I indicated above, however, we postmoderns can also be less than openminded ourselves in our scholarship. One might not be thrown in prison or lose one's teaching position by expressing opinions or having an attitude that goes against the ideological grain of the time, but there can be much social disfavor, which is also oppressive.