Growing the Fields of Historical-Philological Understanding by Kurt Flasch

 

Meister Eckhart and His Students; This Transfiguration is the last painting by Raffael commissioned by Cardinal Giulo de Medici, conceived as an alterpiece for the  Narbonne Catherdral in France (1520)

 

When the anarchical socialist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) insulted Emperor Wilhelm II and was sent to prison in Berlin-Tegel for lese-majeste, he spent his time translating parts of Meister Eckhart’s Middle High German works. He did not get to see them in print; he was a member of the Munich Soviet Republic and was kicked to death in prison after its suppression. In 1920, Martin Buber published them in Berlin as Meister Eckharts Mystische Schriften: In usere Sprache ubertragen von Gustav Landauer. In the first sentence of his preface, Landauer declares, ‘ I will leave out everything that does not make sense to us. Meister Eckhart is too precious for historical evaluation; he has to been resurrected as a living human being.’

Many interpreters of Eckhart have thought similarly, but not many were able to couch their anti-historicism in such grand terms: Eckhart – ‘to precious’ for historical evaluation – to be ‘resurrected’ as a living human being. I take these flashy expressions as a starting point for thinking about the preconditions of historical knowledge. For someone who decides that certain parts of Eckhart’s works ‘do not make sense to us’ lays claim to historical knowledge, even if he calls it something else and even if he does not consider his work on Eckhart ‘historical.’ What matters here are not disciplinary affiliations but the fact that Eckhart died in 1328 and that mediation between his texts and us is unavoidable.

 

Everyone who speaks about Eckhart produces just such historical knowledge in his present and under present conditions. Eckhart does not simply spill over into the present from ‘sources’ in the past. He is identified, constructed, and evaluated under the conditions of the present. No one simply crosses over into the past. The epistemological capabilities, interests, and constraints of the present shape the image of Eckhart that we create for ourselves. Some authors attempt to draw Eckhart directly into their present. They aim to ‘resurrect him,’ but that seems to go beyond human capabilities – at least my own. Eckhart is dead and thus is an object of historical knowledge. Someone who speaks and writes about him is well advised to let us know who is determining the criteria according to which something ‘makes sense’ to ‘us’.  Only then will he think about how much his present predetermines the nature of his historical knowledge, and if his interest in Eckhart is genuine, he will want to use all his available options for acquiring knowledge.

Much of our present, of course, can distract us from Eckhart or obscure him. Yet one of the advantages of the present is the speed with which new source material that expands our image of the constellation of intellectual life around 1300 is made available. Today, we have a better understanding of the conditions of study within the Dominican order and the intellectual debates at Paris than we did fifty years ago – for example, through the continual editions of the works of influential teachers such as Albertus Magnus of Cologne and Henry of Ghent. An account of Eckhart’s thinking must not be limited to identificatory paraphrases of individual ideas and motifs. It requires a focus on Eckhart’s ideas, but at the same time, every reader of Eckhart who really wants t get to know him has first go out into the wide, growing field of historical-philological details.

Within the past decades, four initiatives have improved our understanding of Eckhart’s thoughts:

First, the edition and analysis of sermon cycle of German sermons by Georg Steer. Steer made the unity and previously contested authenticity of these sermons plausible.

Second, Loris Sturlese discovery of the Eckhart manuscript at Oxford has improved the quality of important texts among Eckhart’s Latin works. Sturlese also rewrote the chronology of Eckhart’s Latin works on the basis of a painstaking examination of the Eckhart manuscripts at Erfurt.

Third, Loris Sturlese edition and analysis of Eckhart’s trial records shed new light on  this last phase of Eckhart’s life and thought.

Fourth, the editors of the Corpus Philosophorum Teuonicorum  Medii Aevi made Eckhart’s intellectual milieu accessible. It used to be fashionable to cloak Eckhart in the pathos of lofty solitude; nowadays, we can prove that he had connections to others. We find both similarities and stark contrasts between Eckhart and his contemporaries or his Dominican teachers. Studies of his theoretical position within the German order’s province have received new impetus in the past decades. New texts are constantly being published. A unified picture of the debates will be possible only after a series of specialized studies. There were German followers and adversaries of both Dietrich and Eckhart.

We could argue that someone who has drunk the living juice of the intellectual and linguistic power of an Eckhart or Plato or Kant need not bother with the odds and ends of historical and philosophical detail. But we should remind ourselves that what is considered essential, the poetic-philosophical substrate of Plato’s texts, or Eckhart’s or Kant’s, is controversial and continually being reinterpreted. Not fixed, it is in continual motion, and seemingly small details –dates, manuscript finds, and new biographical data – can all cause significant ripples.

 

Our knowledge or ignorance of certain facts can change our understanding of the basic tenets of earlier philosophers. A failed or successful incorporation of new facts into our commonly held assumptions corrects or conserves certain schools of thought. Without them, subjective appropriations will never experience a corrective; the confident pathos of having captured the essence once and for all remains intact; speech that shuns facts trickles away, vague and imprecise. What previous readings of Eckhart often lack are linguistic discipline, semantic specification, and a philological basis . . .

Evens small advances within philology and history have consequences. All texts even the Bible and even Eckhart’s, are situated within a specific historical context and have to be read and analyzed carefully within that context. Such a proper historical reading by itself is not enough, but it is the only way to avoid wild speculation, mere subjective appropriations, exploitation of the author in behalf of the church or in anti-ecclesiastical contexts, all of which abound within scholarly interpretations of Eckhart.

 

The Essence of Stylistic Appeal by Kenneth Burke

 

In its simplest manifestation, style is ingratiation. It is an attempt to gain favor by the hypnotic or suggestive process of ‘saying the right thing.’ Obviously it is most effective when there is an agreement as to what the right thing is. A plain spoken people will distrust a man, bred to different ways of statement, is overly polite and deferential with them and tends to put his commands in the form of questions (saying ‘Would you like to do this? when he means ‘Do this’) They may even suspect him of ‘sneakiness.’ He, conversely, may consider their blunt manner a bit boastful, even at times when they are most consumed with humility. The ways by which the mannered speaker would ingratiate himself with mannered listeners, or the plain-spoken one with blunt listeners, may thus become style gone wrong when the groups cross.

I have seen men, themselves schooled in the experience of alcohol, who knew exactly how to approach a drunken man, bent on smashing something, quickly act upon him by such phrases and intonations as were ‘just right’ for diverting his fluid suggestibility into the channel of maudlin good fellowship. The very rawness of the accomplishment reveals the process most clearly. Here was a style or ingratiation successfully employed by a poet to produce a desire state of mind in his audience. I should have hated to see a Mathew Arnold tackle the job. He would have been too crude – his training would have been all incapacity. Even in America today (1938), despite our mobility, one may come upon local sequences of statement and rejoinder, a rigidly observed pattern of remarks, gestures and tonalities, which are repeated almost detail by detail whenever neighbors meet. Surely this is not mere psittacism [parroting], but a stylistic formula, away of establishing mutual ingratiation by the saying of right things.

Etiquette is French for label. Larousse says that is put on bottles, boxes, sacks to indicate contents, the price etc. Its derived meaning is, of course, court ceremony and ceremonious forms. Thus, obviously, the more homogeneous a society’s ways of living and doing and thinking are, the more homogeneous will be the labels, hence the greater likelihood the artists will use these labels to their purposes.

When Emily Post sold many hundred  thousand copies of her book between the New Era years of 1925 and 1929, you can confidently look in your literature for a corresponding ‘problem of style,’ There will be forlorn Mathew Arnolds attempting to calm drunkard s by reference to labels almost ludicrously inadequate. There will be tough, hard-boiled work which does manifest the tact of experience, does use the adequate labels required for producing the desired hypnosis under the circumstances. There will be the superficial attempt to establish asset of labels by fiat; the literature of forced sentiments and hothouse elegances, or of such quick allegiances that a proletarian movement in art can arise over night.

Of course, when used by a fertile and ebullient poet, the business of appeal by saying the right things becomes a highly adventurous pursuit. Shakespeare gives some indication how wide the range of conformity may be. In Julius Caesar, for instance,, we see him establish his conspirators as conspirators by the bluntest kinds of label. One plucks at another’s sleeve, they whisper, they feign goodwill, they meet during storms and in the miasmal darkness of night. In King Lear, the ingredients of such a character as Cordelia point to a subtler kind of ingratiation. Shakespeare first shows us how grossly she is misunderstood. Now, who among his audience was not both well-meaning and misunderstood? Hence, who among them did not open his heart to Cordelia, as the further purposes of the playwright made necessary? DeQuincey, commenting on Macbeth, reminds us that Shakespeare may still go deeper. When he has finished depicting Macbeth’s murder of the King, and lets us hear a sinister knock at the gate, has he not her intermingled internal and external events, by objectifying something so private as the harsh knock of conscience, thereby implicating us in the murder not merely as witnesses, but as participants? It will; thus be seen that the use of labels is no obsequious matter, but is best managed by the boldest minds.

It will also be seen that insofar as the structure of these labels is impaired, their serviceability for communicative purposes is correspondingly impaired. One does not hypnotize a man by raising a problem- one hypnotizes him by ringing the bells of his response. Change, heterogeneity of occupation and instability of expectation have a radical bearing upon the range, quality, and duration of such linkages. Add geographical shifts, breakdown of former social stratification, cultural mergers, introduction of ‘new matter’ – and you have so many further factors to affect the poetic medium adversely. The people’s extreme delight in the acting of Charlie Chaplin was probably due to the way in which his accurate mimetic style could surmount the social confusion. His expressions possessed an almost universal significance, since they were based upon the permanent certainties of the body, the eternal correlations between mental attitude and bodily posture.

Various Romantic Solutions

Some poets met the problem  by observing once more the old linkages under glass. They recalled the ancient Mediterranean lore. Like Anatole France, with a mixture of melancholy and irony, they ‘scribbled’ in the margins of books. Others wrote for the elect, a vague quantity X of a public who disliked the entire trend of events, and wished to have their dislike confirmed by an aggressive symbolization of better worlds. Closely connected to these were the writers who harkened  unto themselves, to catch the linkages that grew inescapably out of their own individual lives, hoping that there would be enough overlap upon other lives to establish a  bond. Others satirized the jerry-built linkages which the exigencies of the scene were forever establishing overnight, and which were particularly liable to ridicule when judged from the point of view vestigially surviving out of the past. Others socialized their art by quickly conforming with the interests of the season, using a bias while it lasted, selling a war play in war times, a vice play while the papers were full of news about some minister in a scandal with a member of his choir etc. Connected with these, though less opportunistic in their own eyes at least, were the exploiters of new scientific discoveries, who might depict the deadly ravages of syphilis or alcoholism at a time when much talk of heredity was in the air.

Others made various attempts at neo-primitiveness, either going off to live in regions still relatively unaffected by the disturbances of the pro technological West, or else trying to disclose and exploit the new moralities that were spontaneously arising among various groups formerly considered from the standpoint of incapacity rather than from the standpoint of training: toughs, thieves, lumberjacks, whores, fishermen, smugglers, miners, shop girls, bullfighters, etc. Another group of these neo-primitives stressed sexual concerns as the basis of the undeniable and universal.

 

 

Others met the issue by starting from the issue itself: Their art became a methodology of art. Perhaps the most thorough exemplification of this last solution is to be seen in the later works of James Joyce, who has subjected to the linguistic medium to a severe process of disintegration, largely stimulated by researches in the laboratories of psychology. On a trivial plane, a somewhat analogous tendency is to be noted in the elaborate compound puns in which some of our nonsense comedians now specialize, though in their case the stimulus probably arises more indirectly, not from the laboratory, but from the need of reorientation which the many resources of applied science have led to.

But our concept of trained incapacity prompts us to look for the converse of this situation. The dilemmas of poetry must argue the advantages of something else. If one kind of communication breaks down, another kind will thrive on its ruins.

The positivistic side of the situation is to be seen in the development of the technological approach, with its low anthropomorphic content. The very change in the nature of our written vocabulary bears witness to this. The scientific terminology is conceptual, designed for the purpose of naming, whereas spontaneous symbols of communication are horatory, suggestive, hypnotic. It seems no accident that precisely the century which had so greatly confused its intuitive orientation should have developed, to a greater extent than has ever been know before, the conceptual use of language. Its very muddle as regards the subtleties of mimetic and tonal ingratiation would force us to name things rather than respond to them. Even the dominant music of the century became psychologistic, its programmatic genius strongly observable in the blunt onomatopoetic qualities of Berlioz and the flowering in Wagner’s systematic reliance upon musical naming in his use of the leitmotif. The prestige of instruction rose as the prestige of suggestion fell. Style, beauty, form- these now had to be fought for; or where they prevailed, they were largely expended upon eliciting of morbid response, so extreme as still to be unequivocal. Suasion was for cheap politicians, rhetoric became synonymous with falsity, and strict definition became the ideal . . .

 

Footnote on Style

 

Style is a constant meeting of obligations, a state of being without offense, a repeated doing of the ‘right’ thing. It molds our actions by contingencies, but these contingencies go to the farthest reaches of the communicative. For style (custom) is a complex schema of what-goes-with-what, carried through all the subtleties of manner and attitudes. Its ample practice in social relationships can take the place of competitive success because it is success. We tend to think of customary actions as compulsive –yet values exist today only insofar as custom survives. It is not humane to refrain from murder simply because there are laws against murder – no gratifying social relationships could be constructed upon such a basis. Friendship does not enjoy the protection of the courts – it is upheld by styles dictating the obligations which friends feel towards each other. To codify such obligations would be tantamount to repealing them. The normal tendency to refrain from the murder of one’s allies is ‘rational’ only because it reflects an unquestioned taboo, an undeviating sense of what goes with what. And an obedience to such customary values is not cowardice, but piety.

We have suggested many reasons why old systems of piety must be partially abandoned: any important change in the material conditions to which they were adapted is sufficient to throw them in disorder. For in societies greatly marked by class prerogatives, style itself tends to become a competitive implement, as a privileged group may cultivate to advertise its privileges and perpetuate them. Style then ceases to be propitiatory. It becomes boastful. It is no longer a mode of ingratiation, but a device for instilling fear, like the emperor’s insignia. (such fear is generally called respect.) As style assumes this invidious function, there is a corresponding social movement from inducement towards dominance. Its congregational qualities are lessened, its segregational qualities are stressed. Thus such a feudalistic manifestation of style is probably evidence, in the spiritual plane, of maladjustment in the material plane.

‘Fads’ express the need for conformity at a time when opportunities for conformity are of a low order. They are instinctively sound, since they are strongly communicative, but they are far too liquid and superficial to perform fully the pious function. They are the cultural result of the attempts to patch up the inadequacies of custom by profuse and shifty legislation. Legislation is the soundest when it is merely the codification of custom. But when custom becomes inadequate (for one reason or another) we attempt to reverse the process and mold custom by legislative fiat. This reverse process would be particularly dangerous insofar as the legislative mechanism were in control of any special group alone, without regard for the requirements of the community as a whole. At such times legislation becomes doubly ominous. For not only does it tend to ‘liquidate’ customary sanctions, but it attempts to establish new sanctions inimical to the demands of the group as a whole. It thus blocks the effusive purpose by which style can be wholesomely re-synthesized.