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Vico Reading Homer (and Virgil)
Paper just posted at academia.edu, ‘Vico on Homer and (Virgil)’.
Or read it here.
Vico Reading Homer (and Virgil)
(based on presentation of 16th March 2018 for Logoi: Discussions on Antiquity 2017-2019 Colloquium series)
Giambattista Vico’s, ideas created in the Naples of the early eighteenth century are present everywhere in modern humanities and social science, but his name is hardly mentioned. In particular, historicising and philological approaches to social knowledge and cultural inquiry, have strong antecedents in Vico’s masterwork, the New Science:
[…] the philosophers failed by half in not giving certainty to their reasonings by appeal to the authority of the philologians, and likewise how the latter failed by half in not taking care to give their authority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning of the philosophers.
(NS 140/Vico 1975, 63[ references to Vico’s New Science here and throughout given as NS + paragraph number/bibliographical reference, page number])
Vico’s achievement has a reading of Homeric epic and an understanding of its historical context at its heart. Vico pioneered the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey owe more to oral tradition than any single writer, even claiming that there was no individual Homer, only a tradition of bards grouped together as ‘Homer’. This is itself a significant anticipation of a later eighteenth century interest in folkish traditions in literature. His work as a whole anticipates both the rationalism of Enlightenment and the Romantic idealisation of myth. Vico’s anticipations and underlying influence has been largely hidden from view, but there are significant exceptions which lead to an appreciation of his place.
Vico has been identified, by Arendt (1998, 232 and 298) and Gadamer (1989, 17 and 217) as the thinker at the beginning of modern historical approaches to knowledge, in contrast to the model of the knowledge of nature. Foucault uses Vico to distinguish between spectacular and disciplinary modes of punishment, and power, in Discipline and Punish (1977, 45). In Of Grammatology (1997, 298), Derrida makes the idea of historical return in Vico fundamental to understanding Rousseau’s writing on the relation of nature and society. The scope of Enlightenment historical knowledge covers all of what is now known as the humanities and the social sciences, so Vico should be seen as the closest there can be to a single founder of these fields, leading the way in the Enlightenment pre-formation of the relevant disciplines in Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Smith, Lessing and others which emerge in the form we known them across the nineteenth century. It is not clear that Vico directly influenced any of these thinkers, but he certainly foreshadows their thinking. His work is the first crystallisation of the themes which are further combined and explored in later Enlightenment thinkers. His commentary on Homer, and in a more limited way, Virgil, does not just have a major bearing on the later development of classical philology, but on the whole development of humanities and the social science as the context of philology.
Vico was a scholar of rhetoric and law, who develops this kind of traditional humanistic learning into a philosophical and historical approach. It has an element of defence of humanism against Cartesian philosophy, an element of using Descartes as a model for humanistic-historical thought, and an element of developing a new enterprise, which is that of the science of the institutions created by the human mind. Descartes’ insistence on a deductive method along with the primacy of mathematics and the natural sciences is part of a shift away from the humanistic study of rhetoric and law, which informed the work of the Renaissance scholars preceding Descartes, like Machiavelli and Montaigne. That is writers imbued in the classics, for whom the scholarship of ancient texts and facility in ancient rhetorical techniques is at the core of their work. Machiavelli and Montaigne are awkward precedents for Vico, writing in Naples with church patronage and an active Inquisition in the background, but he does make a positive reference to Machiavelli in the New Science (NS §1003/Vico 1975, 374). Montaigne is completely absent from the text. Though Vico writes to prolong a tradition with ancient roots, he is dealing with thought that has emerged since the Renaissance which emphasises some mixture of nature or natural law, chance or determinism. The idea of nature as on object of observation in which motion through space, including astronomical space, according to mathematical formulae is primary, detaches nature from human purpose and scale. Though the idea of natural law has antique roots, its systematic formulation is a modern phenomenon based on the systematisation of Roman law and its medieval revival, which Vico associates with the incorrect assumption that ‘natural’ law is already present in the earliest human communities. He makes no distinction between natural law and social contract as Hobbes is included with natural law thinkers alongside Hugo Grotius, John Selden and Samuel Pufendorf. Vico expresses the desirability of a middle way between determinism and chance in history in terms of an ancient contrast between Stoicism and Epicureanism. Hobbes is identified as a modern Epicurean. Determinism seems applicable to Descartes, who advocates a Stoic leaning ethics. Despite the ancient contrast invoked, Vico seems to largely refer to two different version of modern natural philosophy, as they may enter the legal and historical thought of his time. Descartes is given both credit and blame for founding a science of nature which does not engage with history and cannot serve as the foundation of historical knowledge. Vico aims to develop a science of institutions created by the human mind.
There is no evidence of direct influence on the Enlightenment thinkers mentioned above. There are possibilities that Shafesbury, Montesquieu and Rousseau became aware of Vico during time in Italy and it is known that J.G. Hamann had a copy of the New Science, spreading knowledge of Vico’s name at least to other German thinkers. However, direct references to Vico amongst major thinkers and scholars come first in F.A. Wolf (1807), the central figure in Homer studies of the time and then S.T. Coleridge in 1825 according to his letters, (Fisch 1943), so only towards the end of his life and writing career. The understanding of Homer from a Viconian point of view came more from Italy at this time though, as demonstrated in M. Cesarotti’s reaction to Wolf Prolegomena to Homer (1985), which itself does draw on the New Science (Grafton — Most — Zetzel 1985, 26). Cesarotti himself left a deep mark on philology, translation and literary work in Italy, so adding his own transmission of Vico in Italian culture to Wolf’s reaction to Vico as an important moment in Vico’s legacy.
There was no complete translation of the New Science until Jules Michelet translated it into French in 1827. Michelet was one of the major historians and historical thinkers of the time, so this is evidence that Vico conditioned historical thinking in the nineteenth century, to some degree. Marx showed some familiarity with Vico in letters and the major figures of nineteenth and early twentieth century Italian culture certainly had some familiarity with Vico. Benedetto Croce, one of the most influential philosophers of his time wrote a book on Vico (1913), translated into English by R.G. Collingwood, himself a major presence in Idealist aesthetics and philosophy of history. Vico emerges as a major influence on French thought in the 1890s when Georges Sorel published “Etude sur Vico” (1896), so entering into the thought of the major theorist of revolution before Lenin, the author of Reflections on Violence, whose influence permeated revolutionary thought on the fascist right and anarcho-syndicalist left, reaching into the Marxism of Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci. Vico’s influence has reached deep into the development of literary studies through Erich Auerbach (1948). Auerbach’s engagement with Vico was followed up by Edward Said and Hayden White (1978). Further discussion of Vico’s place in literary studies can be found in chapter two of Philosophy of the Novel (Stocker 2018). Vico’s place in culture and thought since the twentieth century has its most influential location in the novels of James Joyce. Vico is briefly mentioned in Ulysses and the whole structure of reference to the Odyssey, in the construction of historical parallels between modern Dublin and the Bronze Age Mediterranean is very reminiscent of the approach to Homer in the New Science. The importance of Vico for Joyce, and the historicising philosophy within his literature, is confirmed by Finnegans Wake and Samuel Beckett’s commentary (1939) on the part of Finnegans Wake first published as Work in Progress. The relation between a Viconian approach to Homer and a historical philosophy has its more directly philosophical equivalent in the work Max Horkheimer, by himself and in collaboration with Theodor Adorno. In ‘Vico and Mythology’ (in Horkheimer 1993), Horkheimer refers to Vico’s importance for philosophy of history, philology and social science (375-376). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer together with Adorno, develops a view of Odysseus as the first bourgeois hero, which does correspond with Vico’s view of Odysseus in the Odyssey as closer to the world of law, commerce and rationality than Achilles is in the Iliad.
After making the argument for Vico’s role as a thinker who conditions all the intellectual approaches now brought into classical philology and as an influential interpreter of Homer, it is time to move onto Vico’s own readings of Homer, together with related comments on Virgil, starting with an outline of his general approach and Homer’s place in it. He explains the importance of Homer in the very beginning of the New Science:
The same ray [divine providence] is reflected from the breast of metaphysics onto the statue of Homer, the first gentile author who has come down to us. For metaphysic, which has been formed from the beginning according to a history of human ideas from the commencing of truly human thinking among the gentiles, has enabled us finally to descend into the crude minds of the first founders of the gentile nations, all robust sense and vast imagination. They had only the bare potentiality, and that torpid and stupid, of using the human mind and reason. From that very cause the the beginnings of poetry, not only different from but contrary to those which have been hitherto imagined, are found to lie in the beginning of poetic wisdom, which have from that same cause hitherto been hidden from us.
(NS 6/Vico 1975, 5-6)
In the New Science, Vico offered an alternative to Descartes philosophy, which he believed was necessary for sciences of the human mind, that is knowledge of human ideas and institutions. Vico claimed this alternative was rooted in the philosophy of Descartes’ contemporary, the English philosopher Francis Bacon, but does little to explain how this works. Descartes focused on knowledge of nature and certainty in this knowledge, based on the immediacy and strength of ideas in our mind. Vico argued that there had to be knowledge of human institutions and that Descartes’ own criterion for certainty in knowledge, the strength of ideas in the mind, suggest more certainty in the historical knowledge of human institutions, because such institutions are creations of the mind.
The new science of human institutions is a science of the repetition, recourse of the history of nations. That is the cycle of history which has gone through an original stage and a repetition. The original historical cycle goes from the earliest antiquity to the fall of the Roman Empire in the west. The cycle of repetition goes from the German ‘barbarian’ kingdoms which replaced Roman power in the west in the fifth century to Vico’s own time. Each cycle goes through three stages, though this could be seen as four stages. The first stage is of the age of gods, of the earliest states under the power of patriarchal petty kings claiming divine status. The equivalent in the second cycle is the kings of Germanic tribes. The second second stage is the age of heroes, which is the age of Homer. In this stage, states are city republics governed by a military aristocracy claiming descent from the gods and to be a long way above the bestial common people. The equivalent in the second cycle is the age of knights in the middle ages. The third stage is the human age of rule of law according to reason. The equivalent in the second cycle is the development of modern European states since the late middles ages. This can be divided between two sub-ages, or maybe into two full ages giving a total of four. There is democratic sub-age in which the people rule through city assemblies as in Greece, Rome, and Phoenician cities. The equivalent in the second cycle is the medieval city dominated by guilds, sometimes accompanied by a city assembly. Following this, there is a monarchical sub-age in which the monarch ends the power of aristocratic factions, making and enforcing laws for the public good. The equivalent of this in the second cycle are the absolute monarchs of early modern and Enlightenment Europe.
Vico’s main focus within this account of history is the role of Homer in providing a key to the first cycle of history, along with some more limited discussion of Virgil’s prolongation and transformation of Homeric epic in the Aeneid . The focus on Homer has at least one oddity in that Vico was primarily a Latinist and seems to have very limited competence in ancient Greek compared with Latin, so one of the most important figures in the interpretation of ancient Greek literature was probably relying to some degree on Latin or Italian translation. He refers to the heroes and gods through Latin names rather than Greek names, so that Odysseus appears as Ulysses. Here, the Greek names are used as the natural way to refer to the Homeric world. Despite his linguistic limitation, art least in comparison with his grasp of Latin, Vico’s focus on Homer is deep and profoundly suggestive.
Vico both locates the Iliad and the Odyssey in the heroic age, and suggests the poems incorporate material from the divine and human ages. For Vico this is part of a view of the composition of the epics as a slow collective process over time. There is no Homer, except as a name for the collective achievement of bards from all round the Greek world. The Iliad precedes the Odyssey in Vico’s account and was composed in northeastern Greece. The Odyssey was sung and written later in southwestern Greece. In Vico’s view the Iliad must be earlier, because the Odyssey refers to travel round the Mediterranean world as far west as Italy and as far south as Egypt, in Odysseus’ ten year journey home. Troy is close to the ancient Greek world from the earliest times, when Greek states still confined to the territory of the modern Greek state. Poetry referring to western Anatolia does not require much travel from the Greek homeland compared with Odysseus’ journey right round the eastern Mediterranean.
In his comparisons of the Homeric world with the second cycle of history, Cola di Rienzo, a popular hero of fourteenth century factional politics in Rome, is presented as a new Odysseus. A barbarian but one whose intelligence has developed beyond the level of Achilles. Dante features as the modern Homer and Virgil, not an unusual point of view, but in the context in which Tuscan literature, so Boccacio and Petrarch as well as Dante, is held up as the model of a transition from heroic barbarism to law governed humanity in Europe. According to Vico, and he is not alone on this point, the hero of the Iliad, Achilles is impulsive and lacking in judgement compared with Odysseus, who is the wily intelligent Greek hero in the Iliad, and is even more of a man of judgement in the Odyssey. For Vico, Odysseus is still often childish and barbaric in the Odyssey, examples include tear and his resort to wine to sooth his pain at the loss of his friends from the Trojan war. But we can see that the Odyssey incorporates material from the human age, when we consider the luxury Odysseus sees in the palace of the Phaeacians and the islands of Circe and Calypso, which could only come from an age of trade in which peaceful commerce has replaced wars of wealth extraction. Vico even hints at the decadent phase in the human age, when he suggests these luxuries are like those of the most famously debauched Roman emperors.
For Vico, we can see the material in the Odyssey from the age of gods when we consider the islands of the Cyclops in Odyssey IX (NS 338/Vico 1975, 100), particularly that of Polyphemus who ate some of Odysseus’ men and brought down a curse from Poseidon on him. Then passage which introduces the Cyclops also emphasises the necessity of combining the philologians and the philosophers; which in this context means ancient literature and early modern theorists of natural law. The Cyclops live in caves so preceding even the earliest urban communities. They come from an early extreme patriarchal power of early humans in their caves over their families and dependents, which is the first step towards the god-kings of the divine age who rule over the earliest towns. The Cyclops represent a state of nature missing from Hobbes, Grotius and Selden (313/92, 329/95) who project the laws of their time onto natural humanity. Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf (NS 338/Vico 1975, 100) are said to refer to early forms of human life from the stage of the Cyclops, but do not recognise the reality of the time
Vico finds a source for knowledge of the institutions of the heroic world, as the history of the world, within Iliad XVIII, in Achilles shield ‘the history of the world described by the same Homer as depicted on the shield of Achilles’ (NS 681/Vico 1975 258) . The shield made by Hephaestus/Vulcan which replaces the shield lost when Patroclus wears Achilles’ armour and is killed by Hector, depicts the society of the heroic age and its institutions, according to Vico. The two cities depict the heroic age separation between a warrior aristocracy, which claims divine origins, and a common people the ‘heroes’ define as bestial. In this context, the distinction is between marriage with full ceremonies for the heroes and natural marriage for their dependents (NS 683-686/Vico 1975, 258-259). It is certainly described as a remarkably rich depiction of the Homeric world and this pictorial depiction is the model for Vico’s written discourse. The images on the shield provide the model for the written analysis of heroic society. It is an impossible picture in that it moves, hinting perhaps at the tension between the historical axis and the institutional axis of Vico’s own thought.
According to Vico, though the Odyssey refers to a later more rational age than the Iliad, both the Iliad and the Odyssey refer to a world of unstable emotions. Menelaus reacted to Helen leaving him with Paris, in an extreme way by taking part in the Greek war against Troy ‘though on Helen’s account he stirs all Greece to war against Troy’ (NS 709/Vico 1975, 268), which is the backdrop to the Iliad, but in the Iliad, he appears indifferent to the thought of Paris’ intimacy with Helen. He can only react in the moment to jealousy so that it has disappeared by the time he arrives outside the walls of Troy, where ‘he does not show, throughout that whole long and great war, the slightest sign of amorous distress or jealousy of Paris, who has robbed him of her and is enjoying her’ (NS 709/Vico 1975, 268).
In the Odyssey VIII, Odysseus laughs though generally feeling grief at his exile and wanderings, something Vico does not feel is appropriate to a civilised human: ‘The constancy, moreover which is developed and fixed by the study of the wisdom of the philosophers, could not have depicted gods and heroes of such instability’ (NS 786/Vico 1975 303). The gods in the epics are below the level of gods as understood in more rational times. They appear on the battlefield of Troy and heroes can harm them, as when Diomedes injures Ares and Aphrodite in Iliad V (NS 781/Vico 1975, 301).
Odysseus is associated with the poisoning of arrows in Odyssey Book I, which Vico cannot imagine in a fully civilised leader, ‘the inhuman custom (so contrary to what the writers on the natural law of the gentes claimed to have been eternally practiced among the gentes)’ (NS 781/Vico 1975 302). Achilles’ anger with Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad is also evidence of the primitive nature of the heroes ‘both of them kings calling each other dogs, as servants in popular comedies would scarcely do nowadays’ (NS 782/Vico 1975 782).
The games of Patroclus’ funeral in Iliad XXIII show the origin of the Olympic Games: ‘Achilles caused to be played almost all the kinds of games that were played later in the Olympics when Greek civilisation was at its height’, giving an example of how the heroic age portrayed in extends into the human age of classical Greece, as it contains the earliest seeds of the human world. Elements are already present in the heroic world as the necessary starting point for the emergence of the human world.
Vico discusses Hades in Greek myth, but not Homer and Virgil’s Aeneid in ‘Poetic Cosmography’ section of New Science II. The boundaries of Hades in Virgil show the understanding of carefully defined borders, ‘the earth was associated by the theological poets with the guarding of the boundaries’ (NS 722/Vico 1975 274) as essential to the state in Rome, along with the beginnings of the genealogies of the Roman aristocracy, ‘[h]ere he [Aeneas] beholds his ancestors and those who are to come after him (for on the religion of the graves, called the underworld by the poets, were founded the first genealogies)’ (NS 721/Vico 1975 274) so that Hades in epic is a way of understanding the importance of territorial definition and definitions of lines of inheritance in establishing a Roman state on the basis of strong geographical horizontal boundaries and strong vertical social boundaries to define the aristocracy which dominates the state. The omission of Homer is surprising, but it appears that Vico would have regarded Odysseus’ descent in Odyssey XI, as less significant in defining a state. There is presumably a contrast of Virgil’s account in Aeneid VI with the more chaotic circumstances of ancient Greece, divided between many states often at war with each other and a barbaric aristocracy. Vico does not make his views about the relative places of Homer and Virgil in the development of historical stages, but implicitly he finds Virgil closer to the clear definitions of the human age than Homer is. Vico associates the growth of the Roman state with an interest in territorial measurement and precise boundaries (NS 722/Vico 1975 274).
Vico does not just refer to the social world through Homer, but to how perceptions of reality appear though poetry. An example is the passage in Odyssey IV in which Proteus appears constantly changing in shape (NS 688/Vico 1975,260-261). Vico ridicules attempts to discern a proto-philosophy of a primal substance in this story:
Scholars have also held that the poets meant first matter in the fable of Proteus […] But the scholars thus made sublime learning out of what was doltishness and simplicity on the part of the first men who thought from the various modifications of their own shapes and gestures that there must be man in the water, forever changing into different shapes.
(NS 688/Vico 1975, 260-261)
Vico claim this reflects the early experience of humans seeing a reflection in water. This is a speculative interpretation, but it also provides an early example of an anthropological approach to myth, seeking to discover the social conditions and belief system behind the appearance of myth in poetry . The decoding of rationality behind myth goes back to antiquity itself, as can be seen in Plato’s Phaedrus, but in Vico it is becoming a systematic approach to poetics and myth in which a kind of poetics of experience is used to interpret Homer along with the use of Homer as evidence of a way of thinking. That is there is a form of hermeneutic circle in which Vico builds up an interpretation of Homer through interpretation of the world surrounding Homeric epic and interprets this world through Homeric poetry. In this way, Vico anticipates later poetic phenomenology, philosophical anthropology and mythical-anthropological interpretation of literature, including antique texts.
Vico sees evidence that the Homeric epics extend into the human age, or at least early anticipations of it in references to luxury goods in the Odyssey and more occasionally the Iliad. The appearance of such goods, even in very mythic circumstances, is taken as evidence of trade relations presuming itself a level of social and economic development beyond the accumulation of wealth through plunder typical of the heroes. Vico itemises these instances in ‘The True Homer’ section of the New Science III. This includes the funeral games mentioned above, but as these do not in themselves refer to luxury, they just anticipate later competitive athletic culture, they are an exception to the discussion of luxury. Examples of luxury include the gardens, banquets and palace of Alcinous, King of the Phacians in Odyssey VII (NS 795/Vico 1975, 306). Vico sees evidence of trade with the Phoenicians, the early instigators of Mediterranean trade, in linen that appears in Odyssey XIX and a garment belonging to Penelope in Odyssey XVIII. Vico considers the latter to be: ‘An invention worthy of the effeminacy of our day!’ (NS 796/Vico 1975, 306). This gendered concern with decadent luxury is in tension with Vico’s general tendency to applaud the human age, so we should consider an underlying longing for the heroic age as playing a role in the structure of his thought.
Priam’s cedar chariot in Iliad XXIV, used to drive towards Achilles’ tent (NS 797/Vico 1975, 306), is given as another example of human age luxury, which is not associated with femininity, but further examples continue the association of commerce and luxury with femininity. The cedar in Priam’s chariot appears again in the perfume in the cave of Calypso in Odyssey V (NS
797/Vico 1975, 306). The theme of the semi-divine women who delay Odysseus’ journey home with erotic entrapment continues with references to the luxury of Circe’s bath in Odyssey X (NS 798/ Vico 1975, 306). Vico goes so far as to suggest this exceeds the luxury of the first century Roman Emperor Nero and the third century Emperor Heliogabalus, both notorious for alleged cruelty and luxurious decadence. Vico here betrays not only discomfort with the ‘feminine’ and associated decadence, but a general ambiguity about the relative merits of the heroic and human ages. Mostly Vico refers to the advantages of a world of reason, law and humanity, but there is also an admiration for the strength and passion of the heroic age, which produces poetry of a kind impossible in the human age. The theme of discomfort with supposedly feminised men continues with references to Iliad III and XI, where Diomedes and Hector criticise Paris for caring for his hair like a woman (NS 800/Vico 1975, 307).
Vico adds a more literary argument to his case for saying that Homeric poetry comes at the end of the heroic age and therefore overlaps with the early moments of the emergence of the human age. This comes out of looking at a remark in Horace’s Ars Poetica, advising writers to take their characters from Homer (NS 806/Vico 1975, 308-309), which Vico takes as evidence that Homeric poetry comes at a third and final stage of the heroic age, where all that appears in Greek tragedy and comedy already has some reality, and what was ‘true narration’ has become ‘altered and corrupted’ over two stages (NS 808/Vico 1975, 310).
For Vico, the Homeric world is already a struggle between Enlightenment and poetic imagination. Poetic imagination is divine and natural in the singular concrete force of words and poetic images. The poetic world is already a departure from the earliest stage of humanity wondering in forests after great floods. At this point humanity is hardly separate from the natural world and is unaware of the divine world. The divine world and language appear simultaneously when the early giants experience thunderstorms. The sound with which they naturally react is the origin of the world Jove and all words in all communities for all equivalent divine figures. This sets the scene for the Homeric world. The separation from nature rests on simultaneous awareness of the divine and of language, resting on a moment in nature. Homeric poetry is a step beyond that into a human rationality, so into Enlightenment. The first full Enlightenment is implicitly the Athens of Plato. Homeric poetry is enlightened, that is separate from nature and the divine in creating a world of linguistic articulation and representation. This is not possible for humanity before language, and not even for the first kind of language, which precedes the gathering of humans in dry areas as refugees from floods. Myth itself is a way in which humans separate themselves from nature and pure divine force. Vico’s reading of Homer gives a model for epic poetry as a way of interpreting ‘heroic’ societies and and as a model of the constant movement in writing interpretation between poetic force and rational enlightenment. A sociology of literature emerges which is also a sociology of knowledge.
The poetry of Homer is that of imaginative universals (NS 460/Vico 1975, 154) in which one thing, perhaps a divinity, stands for a whole class of things. This is the stage which precedes the abstract universals of Athenian philosophy. The growth of abstract reason is part of the growth of law and the human world, but means the loss of the power of imagination expressed in the most forceful poetry. Vico’s interpretation of Homer is so important to his philosophy of history and society that he puts Homer in the frontispiece of key visual images at the opening of the New Science. There is an ambiguity here in the presentation of Homer, which is an ambiguity in Vico’s thought. If Homer represents ‘divine providence’ reflected from metaphysics as the ‘poetic wisdom’ that emerges from ‘robust sense and vast imagination’ (NS 6/ Vico 1975, 6) then Homeric poetry is poetic wisdom containing sense and imagination for all time. It comes from the point of view of the founders of the gentile nations, that is the non-Jewish nations which were not guided directly by God in antiquity, but remains the poetic, imaginative and sense oriented version of providence, of universal intelligence and the cycle of history for all time. The basic knowledge of early history comes from this poetry.
Even given the growth of archaeological evidence since Vico’s time, this remains something relevant to our understanding of Mycenaean Greece. It is not just relevant to that, but also Hittite Anatolia (Bachvarova 2016), Iron Age Greece and very likely earlier Bronze Age Greece, if not earlier. The portrait of the Cyclops, which for Vico is the model for understanding of divine monarchies that is the first states, could contain traces of memory of Neolithic communities, that is the first agricultural communities. It certainly seems to refer to something preceding the Bronze Age, the taming of horses (therefore the Indo-European expansion into Europe) and palace civilisation. Even cutting out this last point as speculation, Homeric epic is undoubtedly composed over a long period from the late Bronze Age to the Archaic Age, at least for a period of about 350 years in which Greece underwent a Bronze Age peak with a written language, a ‘dark age’ with no written records, and a new Iron Age literacy.
Vico offers Homeric epic as a key to understanding a transition from Divine through Heroic to Human ages, corresponding to the movement from the earliest stratified priestly communities to the republics of Greece and Rome at the time when popular assemblies had significant power, which is also a transition from autarchic rural communities to widespread trade and commerce. This has not just disappeared from the human world, but could come again in a new cycle of history. The imagination and sense, which Vico mentions, cannot just vanish from the human world, it must be part of the human world. The human world must be able to reflect on it.
Homeric poetry is repeated as a stage of history in Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Divine Comedy. More recently James Joyce performed a repetition of Homer and Vico in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, so that Vico’s arguments for a grand pattern of repetition has inspired its own repetition along with another repetition of Homer. Vico’s own interpretation of Homer looks for evidence of historical stages and historical progress. This partly reflects an Enlightenment separation of literate law governed and commercial societies from barbarism, savagery, myth and the concrete use of language. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Vico has a sense of the nearness of an earlier age lacking in law and the moderation of commercial societies. For Hume and Smith, this is an awareness of the clannish Highland Scots, held down by the British state after 1745. For Smith, it is sometimes closer to the existence of a civilised state as when he fears the monarchical militarist French as enemies of the republican commercial Dutch. The equivalent in Vico is the uneducated Italian peasant ‘our stubborn peasants, who yield to every reasonable argument put to them, but, because their powers of reflection are weak, as soon as the argument which has moved them leaves their minds, return at once to their original purpose’ (NS 708, Vico 1975, 267) who could from an earlier age than the time of human monarchies he celebrates. Again, there is a closer danger mingled with civilisation in the aristocratic republics of Venice and German imperial cities (NS 29/Vico 1975, 19). The aristocratic republic, dates back to the age of heroes, the time of Homer. Enlightenment thinkers may see barbarians as invigorating. That is Montesquieu’s view of the German invasion of Roman lands during the disintegration of the western Roman Empire.
The need to take something from an earlier age, or at least find an equivalent for it, is another tendency within Enlightenment. Smith hoped that in his time education could replace the military participation of all citizens as a way of giving unity to a commercial society. Rousseau looked back to Ancient Sparta and Rome, without their foundation in slavery. Kant feared the loss of vitality in law governed communities. As Gadamer points out in Truth and Method (1989), Enlightenment itself tends to produce a fascination with what is not Enlightenment, with myth now turned into a power preceding Enlightenment and threatening it. Vico’s view of the return of the earliest stages of human development is more apocalyptic than the other Enlightenment thinkers, maybe with the exception of Adam Ferguson who shares Vico’s basic assumption that history is cyclical. For Vico, return of the divine age, savagery in other Enlightenment thinkers is the collapse of law governed communities into a state of constant violence and disorder. The human age of law and rationality progressively loses its capacity to hold down force, or exclude it, as law supersedes the use of force. In Vico’s case, the myth separated from reason will return in the most absolute and violent way. The fascination with Homer follows from this, since this is the myth which gets us as close as possible to the apocalypse of the return of the divine age. The Homeric epics refer to the later heroic age, but that itself contains traces of the divine age, and is as close as it is possible to get to writing from and on the divine age. Homer’s myth is the opposite of Vico’s own rationalism, a claim to extend the insights of Francis Bacon into the history of human institutions, doing for the knowledge of these institutions what Descartes did for knowledge of nature. It is also infecting Vico’s rationalism since it is the model of knowledge of human institutions. This knowledge must be historical for Vico, it must look at origins so the imaginative universals of Homer are the source of Vico’s own thought about history.
For Vico, in the imaginative universals of Homeric poetry, ‘as Achilles connotes an idea of valour common to all strong men, or Odysseus an idea of prudence common to all wise men’ (NS 403/Vico 1975, 128). His own science is an exploration of the value of heroic valour compared with rational prudence, in which rational prudence necessarily conquers the brutality of heroic valour, but collapses in an explosion of violence, because it lacks the vitality of heroic virtue. Vico’s ‘science’ is itself the application of heroic violence in its elevation of Homer and its insistence on a Homeric template for history. As well as a battle of courage to win acceptance for a new idea of history, it is also a journey of prudent rationality as Vico works out the details and the coherence of this task, which creates a new myth unifying all myths and a new science unifying all human sciences. Myth and reason, courage and prudence, Achilles and Odysseus, heroic and human, poetry and science are all pairs of joined together opposites cohering and destroying each other according to the moment. The return home is a new spiralling moment of history in which the reading of Homer is forever repeated and renewed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARENDT, H. (1998). The Human Condition. Chicago (IL)/London. University of Chicago Press.
AUERBACH, E. (1948). “Vico and Aesthetic Historicism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 8/2: 110-118.
BACHVAROVA, M. (2016). From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek
Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
BECKETT, S (1939) “Dante…Bruno. Vico…Joyce” in Beckett, S, M. Brion et al (1939) OUR
EXAGMINATION AROUND HIS FACTIFICATION FOR INCAMINATION OF WORK IN
PROGRESS. London: Faber & Faber, 5-13.
CROCE, B. (1913). The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. (Trans. R.G. Collingwood). New York
NY: Macmillan.
DERRIDA, J. (1997. Corrected edition) Of Grammatology. (Trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore ML:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
FISCH, M.H. (1943). “The Coleridges, Dr Prati and Vico,” Modern Philology 41/2: 111-122.
GADAMER, H-G. (1989). Truth and Method. (Trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall). London/
New York (NY): Continuum Books.
GRAFTON, A. — MOST, G.W. — ZETZEL, J.E.G. ‘Introduction’. In Wolf 1985.
HORKHEIMER, M. (1993). Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings.
(Trans. G.F. Hunter, M.S. Kramer and J. Torpey). Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press.
MAIER, J. (1976). “Vico and Critical Theory,” Social Research 43/4: 845-856.
SAID, E.W. (1985). Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York NY: Columbia
University Press.
SOREL, G. (1896). “Etude sur Vico,” Le Devenir social 2: 785-817, 906-41, 1013-46.
STOCKER, B. (2018). Philosophy of The Novel. London: Plagrave Macmillan.
WHITE, H. (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore ML: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
WOLF, F.A. (1807). “Giambattista Vico über den Homer,” Museum der Alterthumns Wissenschshaft
1: 550-570.
WOLF, F.A. (1985). Prolegomena to Homer (1795). (Trans. A. Grafton, G.W. Most and J.E.G.
Zetzel). Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.
Turkey local elections ’19. Thoughts on national vote distribution.
Let’s focus on comparisons with last local elections 2014 for national shares of votes. (*note at bottom on parties for those not very familiar with Turkish politics, links to voting information here for 2014 and here for 2019).
1. It’s very soon to say anything definitive about city by city, municipality by municipality results in Turkey.
2. Big stories are that Ankara appears to have gone to the opposition and Istanbul is very very close, enough to be embarrassing for the AKP even if they do scrape in, but OK they will still have the Power.
3. It does look like the largest opposition party, CHP, has made substantial progress in municipalities controlled. For reasons I’ll make clear below, I think this is probably about IYI Parti support
4. National vote distribution is clear, highly unlikely to change by more than one or two per centage points.
5. Compared with 2014, AKP and CHP are about the same, MHP is down and HDP is about the same.
6. MHP is doing well on municipality by municipality basis in some cases winning from AKP, so this may be declared a good night for MHP (just as HDP is losing municipalities on a stable per centage since 2014)
7. BUT their per centage is substantially down since 2014 local elections and 2018 national elections.
8. Their national vote in 2014 corresponds with the total of MHP and IP votes in this election.
9. The IP is a break away from MHP, offering a more moderate version of its ‘grey wolf/idealist hearths’ tradition, corresponding to the aspect which overlapped with the centre right and the more nationalist aspects of centre-left thinking (which has strong Jacobin-Kemalist roots).
10. The CHP candidate for Ankara, Mansur Yavaş is an MHP defector in this mould.
11. Given how right wing/nationalist the balance of Turkish politics is, IP could be the middle ground. It is allied with CHP and IP votes are going to CHP in just about all the larger urban centres as IP has stood down).
12. There was a de facto CHP-MHP alliance in 2014 (with a token MHP candidate in Ankara and other places were CHP had hopes), since when MHP has gone over to Erdoğanist alliance and split.
13. It looks to me like there is a bigger turn out of moderate nationalists for the CHP than in 2014 in target municipalities and that has made the difference. In 2014 MHP voters who didn’t like the CHP could still vote for their own candidate, or perhaps defect to AKP or stay at home. Nationally some CHP votes will have shifted to IP in small towns it is targetting.
12. The AKP vote look solid given economic difficulties, even if there is a bit more fiddling of votes than in 2014. This leaves the question of whether the AKP base does not blame it all for economic difficulties, or whether it distinguishes between local AKP leaders and Erdoğan.
13. Economic difficulties likely to get worse, so it remains to be seen what effect that will have on the AKP base for the 2023 national elections, when it is likely to have experienced years of economic stagnation and high inflation.
14. Yes local elections are about local issues, and local alliances/strategic voting to some degree but not entirely. If we look at local elections as purely a locality by locality phenomenon then logically we can’t connect it with national politics at all. Well everyone does in practice connect it with national politics and I suggest it is a reasonable, if very rough, rule of thumb to say that national percentages average out local issues and tell us something about national mood, particularly when a like to like comparison is made with previous local elections, when to a large degree there were the same local issues
*Note on parties: AKP (JDP: Justice and Development Party). Erdoğan’s party. Nationalist. Religious. Conservative. CHP (RPP: Republican People’s Party). Centre left. Social democrat. Secularist. Republican national/Jacobin-Kemalist. MHP (NAP) Hard core nationalist. Pan-Turkisti Ottomanist and national-republican elements. IP (GP: Good Party) Same roots at MHP but more moderate, closer to centre-right and centre-left national republicans. HDP (PDP: People’s Democratic Party) Kurdish rights/Kurdish resistance, socialist left, minority rights.
Turkey Local Elections 31 March 2019
Local elections in Turkey today across the country.
1. Ankara and Istanbul could fall to opposition according to many, though not all opinion polls.
2. Bursa, Antalya, Adana, Balıkesir, Denzili, Şanliurfa seem to be the other cities with the highest chance of a shift to the opposition
3. State media extremely hostile to opposition as is most ‘private’ (mostly owned by government cronies sometimes due to rigged auctions and purchases by consortia formed for political reasons.
4. Hostility means constant claims that the opposition is pro-terrorist, anti-Muslim, treasonous, working with religious community associated with 2016 coup attempt, and criminal.
5. So, any opposition victory is in the face of a public sphere and state apparatus dominated by pro-Erdoganist bias of an aggressively intolerant kind, so is double the achievement it appears to be
6. Bad and worsening economic/living standards situation should at least persuade some previous pro-govt voters to stay at home or defect
7. Pro-Erdoğan ‘Republican’ (hard religious and national right) alliance versus opposition (centre left and centre right) ‘National’ alliance the main contest, but leftist-Kurdish autonomy HDP important in the southeast. Also religious conservative SP could be important in attracting defectors from Erdoğan, not in very large numbers but enough to make a difference.
BUT
1. Never be sure about polls
2. Good reason to suspect that large scale vote rigging is likely
3. Good reason to believe that Ankara was vote was rigged, if by a small margin in 2014 and the situation has got worse since then, particularly in the 2017 referendum to create a hyper-presidential/elective sultan republic.
4. AKP apparatus doing everything to minimise economic problems and blame them on foreign conspiracy
5. Government has removed elected administrations and replaced them with state ‘administrators’ (AKP cronies) in many opposition municipalities, particularly in the (Kurdish majority) southeast
6. Looks like government-state-AKP (there is very little difference between them) may try to prosecute main opposition candidate in Ankara and disqualify him on the basis of nonsense claims of criminality circulated just in time for the election
7. Particularly strong suspicions that Erdoğan regards the loss of Istanbul as unacceptable and would authorise more than the marginal manipulation of the vote which has become normal
8. HDP treated as a barely legal party and subject to extreme and systematic harassment
9. So the question of the moment is now, not just how votes are cast, but how far the AKP apparatus will go in manipulating the vote, and then how far it will go in replacing elected mayors with government appointments.
10. Personally I regard any opposition loss by a margin of up to 2% as definitely the result of rigging and fear that rigging could be worse than that.
My latest publication: ‘Statism and Distributive Injustice in Adam Smith’
My paper ‘Statism and Distributive Injustice in Adam Smith’ has just been published as a chapter in New Perspectives on Distributive Justice: Deep Disagreements, Pluralism, and the Problem of Consensus (De Gruyter, November 2018), edited by Manuel Andreas Knoll, Stephen Snyder and Nurdane Şimşek. €109.95/$126.99/£100 for eBook (EPUB and PDF) and hardback formats.
Paper abstract This paper seeks to displace contemporary “progressive” attempts to bring Adam Smith into the fold of thinkers who support a form of state intervention favouring the welfare of its poorest members through distributive justice. The paper argues that despite the validity of pointing to Smith’s support of those at the lowest economic level, it never amounts to redistribution of wealth, especially to the poorest. The state structure Smith proposes does favour those with the most at stake in maintaining a stable political structure. The paper argues that the real and genuine concern Smith shows for the poorest element, would be supported by the state through the development of a legal system that would prevent or hinder the bad behaviour of the upper classes and state craft that promotes broader economic development while promoting the better virtues of societies wealthier members. Though there are distributive elements of Smith’s theory that favours the poor, they tend to be measures that prohibit attempts at distribution that could end up harming the poor. Thus, there is no basis for the assertions of egalitarian liberals who see in Smith’s work support for state sponsorship of an ideal formula for resource distribution.
Contents
Editors
Introduction: Two Opposing Concepts of Distributive Justice
Part I: Deep Disagreements
Manuel Knoll
Deep Disagreements on Social and Political Justice: Their Meta-Ethical Relevance and the Need for a New Research Perspective
Ulrich Steinvorth
Are There Irreconcilable Conceptions of Justice? Critical Remarks on Isaiah Berlin
Michael Haus
Equality Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Walzer’s Contribution to the Theory of Justice
Giovanni Giorgini
Stuart Hampshire and the Case for Porcedural Justice
Bertjan Wolthuis
Public Reason in Circumstances of Pluralism
Manuel Knoll/Nurdane Şimşek
Does Rawls’ First Principle of Justice Allow for Consensus? A Note
Part II: Ancient Perspectives and Critiques of the Centrality of Justice
Francisco L. Lisi
Aristotle on Natural Right
Eckart Schütrumpf
What is “Just in Distribution” in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics – Too Much Justice, Too Little Right
Christoph Horn
Justice in Ethics and Political Philosophy: A Fundamental Critique
Chandran Kukathas
Justicitis
Part III: The Problem of Consensus
Alberto L. Siani
Rawls on Overlapping Disagreement and the Problem of Reconciliation
Chong-Ming Lim
Public Reason, Compromise within Consensus and Legitimacy
Ulrike Spohn
From Consensus to Modus Vivendi? Pluralistic Approaches to the Challenge of Moral Diversity and Conflict
Manon Westphal
What Bonds Citizens in a Pluralistic Democracy? Probing Mouffe’s Notion of a Conflictual Consensus
Michal Rupniewski
Citizenship, Community, and the Rule of Law: With or Without Consensus?
Peter Caven
Political Liberalism: The Burdens of Judgement and Moral Psychology
Part IV: Expanding the Perspective on Obligations
Angela Kallhoff
John Rawls and Claims of Climate Justice: Tensions and Prospects
Annette Förster
Assistance, Emergency Relief and the Duty Not to Harm – Rawls’ and Cosmopolitan Approaches to Distributive Justice Combined
Bill Wringe
Collective Global Obligations, Just International Institutions and Pluralism
Stephen Snyder
Intergenerational Justice in the Age of Genetic Manipulation
Part V: Diversifying the Perspective
Kok-Chor Tan
The Contours of Toleration: A Relational Account
Chad Van Schoelandt/Gerlad gaus
Constructing Public Distributive Justice: On the Method of Functionalist Moral Theory
Elena Irrera
Respect as an Object of Equal Distribution? Opacity, Individual Recognition and Second-Personal Authority
Maria Dimitrova
Responsibility and Justice: Beyond Moral Egalitarianism and Rational Consensus
Tom Bailey
Habermas’ and Rawls’s Postsecular Modesty
Part VI: The Difference Principle
Peter Koller
A Defence of the Difference Principle beyond Rawls
Aysel Demir
Marxist Critiques of the Difference Principle
Part VII: The Economic Perspective: Adam Smith
Jeffrey Young
Justice, Equity, and Distribution: Adam Smith’s Answer to John Rawls’s Difference Principle
Barry Stocker
Statism and Distributive Injustice in Adam Smith
My latest book: Philosophy of the Novel
Philosophy of the Novel (Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2018) is now available as an ebook from the publisher. Go to either the Palgrave Macmillan page or the SpringerLink page. Palgrave Macmillan is now part of the German based Springer Nature group, though continuing to have its own editorial offices in London. Judging by my experience, production is now integrated at the group level. The US Macmillan operation now has no relation with Palgrave Macmillan.
The book can be downloaded in pdf or epub formats. The ebook is not yet available from Amazon or any other online bookstore. Maybe this will come when the hardback appears in print next month. It is now available for preorder. The ebook is €74 and the hardback will be €95.
The hardback is available for pre-order from Amazon. £80 from Amazon UK. $110 from Amazon US. €102 from Amazon France. €96 from Amazon Germany €122 from Amazon Italy. €94 from Amazon Spain. R$395 from Amazon Brazil. ₹8 6041 from Amazon India.
Chapters and Information from Publisher’s webpages.
(I will try to add other ways of explaining and introducing the book over the next few weeks)
This book explores the aesthetics of the novel from the perspective of Continental European philosophy, presenting a theory on the philosophical definition and importance of the novel as a literary genre. It analyses a variety of individuals whose work is reflected in both theoretical literary criticism and Continental European aesthetics, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. Moving through material from eighteenth century and ancient Greek philosophy and aesthetics, the book provides comprehensive coverage of the major positions on the philosophy of the novel. Distinctive features include the importance of Vico’s view of the epic to understanding the novel, the importance of Kierkegaard’s view of the novel and irony along with his other aesthetic views, the different possibilities associated with seeing the novel as ‘mimetic’ and the importance of Proust in understanding the genre in all its philosophical aspects, relating the issue of the philosophical aesthetics of the novel with the issue of philosophy written as a novel and the interaction between these two alternative positions.
1. Introduction. From Analysis to Form
This chapter investigates major aesthetic approaches to the philosophy of the novel and develops distinct approaches to be used in the book. The distinction between Analytic and Continental European philosophical approaches is established. The Analytic approach is largely explored with reference to Peter Lemarque. Its limitations are defined through a discussion of Lemarque’s approach to Roland Barthes as a literary critic. The nature of ethics and literature as an approach to the novel is identified and its limitations are discussed. Martha Nussbaum is selected as an example of ethical philosophical criticism at its best. Her approach and its limitations are discussed in relation to poetics, erotics and ethics, focusing on her reading of Jacques Derrida.
2. Epic in Aristotle and Vico
Epic is discussed as a forerunner to the novel. Aristotle’s comments on Homeric epic in the Poetics and Rhetoric are fully explored, to establish a view of what epic is and its relation to public forms of speech. Giambattista’s New Science is discussed with regard to its philosophy of history, its account of poetry and the central role it gives to Homeric philosophy. This is discussed as partly the product of a growing novelistic culture in Vico’s time and as applying to main aspects of the novel including its relation both to epic discourse and the more variable discourse of everyday life.
3. Idealism and Romanticism
The literary aesthetics of the eighteenth century is discussed with regard to the growth of the novel as a literary genre, noting it that is not incorporated much into aesthetics. It is in the late eighteenth century that Romantic philosophers such as Friedrich Schlegel begin to develop a philosophy of the novel based on its appeal to subjectivity and unstable perspectives, summed up in the term ‘irony’. Hegel’s reaction to Schlegel and less elevated role for the novel is explored along with related aspects of his literary aesthetics. This chapter then covers the role of nature, particularly as known to chemistry as a model for understanding and appreciating the novel, or at least setting up the possibility of doing so.
4. Kierkegaard, Irony and Subjectivity
Søren Kierkegaard is discussed as the first philosopher to develop an understanding of the novel at length. Four of his texts are considered: From the Papers of One Still Living, The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, A Literary Review. The first is considered for its account of Danish novels in a world of unpredictability and subjectivity. The second is considered for its view of Socratic irony and dialogue, Romantic irony and novels, along with Hegel’s criticisms. The third is considered for its accounts of tragedy and opera, as deeply connected with novelistic aesthetics, as well as the Romantic novelistic structure of Either/Or. The fourth is discussed for its view of the place of the novel in the political and social understanding of the time.
5. Lukács on Subjectivity and History (Introduced Through Nietzsche)
The chapter begins with what Nietzsche contributes to the philosophy of his novel through his remarks on Stendhal and Dostoevsky, along with his view of how the novel emerges from the death of tragedy in antiquity. These thoughts are considered as what opens the way for Lukács. Lukács is mostly considered for his Romantic work on the novel, though his Marxist phase is also considered. His view of the novel as a fall from epic unity between individual, and the world is emphasised along with other historical aspects.
6. Bakhtin, Ethics and Time
Bakhtin is discussed with regard to the antique and medieval precursors for the novel, pluralism of voices, carnival, temporal analysis and approach to Dostoevsky. François Rabelais is discussed as the source of the transformation of the carnivalesque into novel. The ethical and political aspects of Bakhtin’s commitment to plurality of voices and registers are considered. The relation of his literary analysis with his view of the distinction between Orthodox and Catholic churches is discussed, along with his Russian populist leanings
7. Mimesis, Humanism and Time
Erich Auerbach is considered as a theorist of mimesis and of the decline of Europe, influenced by Vico. His more humanist view is compared with the anti-humanism of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to the extent that they see the current civilisation as doomed and lacking in ideals. This Marxist view is compared with more conservative and liberal views of the growth of state power. Adorno and Benjamin are compared as more nihilistic and more religious thinkers. Their views of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel are discussed.
8. Mimetic Limits. Desire, Death and the Sacred
This chapter looks at how French writers of the mid-twentieth century take mimesis away from the centre of the novel. Georges Bataille puts ‘evil’ at the centre, that is the breaking of social habits to reach some deep level of desire which is enacted rather than represented. Maurice Blanchot puts death and meaninglessness at the centre of the novel, which drifts towards and between moments of emptiness and extinction. René Girard has a more Christian Huımanist view of the dangers of mimetic desire and violence, which may be resolved by moments of transcendence. The more violent and apocalyptic aspects of his views are also explored. Finally, the chapter considers how French anti-mimeticism is taken up by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
9. The Absolute Novel. Proust on Lost Time
Marcel Proust’s river novel, In Search of Lost Time, is considered as anovel of absolutes as advocated by the Romantics. The consideration of Proust both as a philosophically interested writer and as the object of an enormous amount of philosophical attention. How Proust’s transcendental aesthetic subjectivity connects with historical, national and European consciousness through memory. His place in the history of literature and how he writes as someone located in the history of literature always concerned with other kinds of history. The specific place of his writing in Third Republic France and the political interpretation of this include the movement from aristocratic to democratic worlds.
10. The Philosophical Novel
How the novel and philosophy may become the same and the limitations on such hopes. After a survey of examples, the chapter focuses on James Joyce’s relationship with Vico and Homer (continuing considerations in Chap. 2), Joyce’s relationship with Kierkegaard, Jane Austen’s relationship with ethics and Austen’s indirect relationship with Kierkegaard. The chapter considers both how the most obviously literary philosophical and philosophical literary works may be considered from a philosophical novel perspective, but also how a less obviously philosophical writer like Austen is full of philosophical insights. This continues considerations in the introduction on how ethics and the novel may be related.
Economic Liberalism and (Re)Building Europe after WWII.
Reposted from Notes On Liberty
Opening paragraphs
It is important to understand that economic recovery and growth in Europe after World War II is not as tied to Keynesianism, unfunded welfarism, and corporatism as is sometimes assumed.
The Glorious Thirty Years of European recovery from world war and subsequent growth were not due to ‘Keynesianism’ etc. The Thirty Years ended because the influence of liberal policies had weakened and the costs of other policies had accumulated to create an obviously dysfunctional system. Left-wingers (and communitarian-corporatist conservatives) who think ‘market fundamentalists’ overthrew a well functioning social and economic settlement which was behind all the economic growth and associated institution building (post-war national recovery and European Union construction) are in error. It is a major error to ignore the influence of Austrian School liberals (see the discussion by a leading current practitioner of Austrian economics, Peter Boettke) and the related Ordoliberalismus of the Freiburg School.
My remarks on what the major terms and schools in this paragraph refer to have become uncontrollably long, so they are relegated to the bottom of the post. I hope readers will have the patience to reach them.
The key points are that the German post-war Economic Miracle came from Ordo-liberal policies, while economic growth in France after Charles de Gaulle came to power for the second time in 1958 comes from the policies of Jacques Rueff, a civil servant, judge, and economist who participated in the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium in Paris, a decisive event in the revival of liberal economic thinking attended by Hayek and many other notable liberal thinkers.
Ottomanism, Nationalism, Republicanism IX
My latest at the group blog Notes On Liberty. Turkey from the coup of 1971 to the coup of 1980.
After a break dealing with proofs and indexes of two forthcoming books, a process that overlapped with getting a new university semester started, I can return to this series, which I last added to here. I set the scene of the late 1960s in Turkey, so I will turn to the next big upheaval, the Coup by Memorandum on March 12th 1971.
The Coup by Memorandum followed an attempted coup by far left/third worldist revolutionaries amongst the officer corps. Any unity created by the Kemalist project (secularist national-republican tradition of Turkey’s founder, Kemal Atatürk) was effectively ended, though this decomposition could be said about the whole period from the 1940s to 1971, especially after the adoption of multi-partyism by Atatürk’s successor, İsmet İnönü.
The 1971 coup forced the resignation of the conservative Prime Minister Süyleman Demirel and the implementation of a program to crush the far left, while also…
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Why Hayek was Wrong about American and European Conservatism IV
‘Why Hayek was Wrong about American and European Conservatism IV. My latest contribution to the group blog Notes On Liberty
Continuing a discussion from here inspired by F.A. Hayek’s essay ‘Why I am Not a Conservative’.
One central claim of Hayek’s essay is that American conservatism is not the same as European conservatism, as it is rooted in the classical liberalism of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. He notes that ‘European’ style conservatism exists in the US but claims it is an artificial import that looks odd. A really big problem here is Hayek’s assumption that there are native national forms of political culture which are authentic compared with alien intrusions. Of course national context and tradition are important, but that should not conceal understanding of pluralism, emergence from the margins of positions that have always been there, change, and influences across national frontiers.
Hayek’s talk of odd looking imports into American conservatism may cover Russell Kirk and William Buckley, both major influences…
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Why Hayek was Wrong about American and European Conservatism II
My latest at the group blog Notes On Liberty
The first post in this series concentrates on the more radical authoritarian populist side of conservatism in Europe. Before getting on to American conservatism and other aspects of European conservatism, I will respond to requests in the comments for definitions of what I mean by liberalism and conservatism. The shortest class definition I am aware of is that of David Hume in his essay ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’ where he suggests that Whigs (liberals) favour liberty with a monarchy and that Tories (conservatives) favour monarchy with liberty. This can be expanded with little, if any controversy, to be taken as: liberals advocate liberty with order; conservatives favour order with liberty.
I will move from Hume to Benjamin Constant in Principles of Politics Applicable to all Governments. Constant is surely an unimpeachable source on what it is to be a classical liberal and it is important to…
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Stockerblog 