Persistent Enlightenment

“Counter-Enlightenment” in English (1908-1942) (Fabricating the “Counter-Enlightenment” Part III)

Posted on December 12, 2013 by James Schmidt

The two previous posts in this series examined nineteenth and early twentieth-century German uses of the term “Gegenaufklärung” and argued, contra Zeev Sternell, that the term does not seem to have been generally adopted as a convention for referring to opponents of the Enlightenment until the first decades of the twentieth century. Further, it is clear that the term has consistently been used to describe positions held by others, rather than as a characterization of the position that individuals themselves hold. Finally, some of the “others” to whom the term has been applied included figures (e.g., “materialist” followers of Darwin) who have sometimes viewed as part of a tradition associated with “the Enlightenment.” In other words, what we take to be “the Enlightenment” represented, for those defenders of a “true enlightenment” grounded in religion, a “Gegenaufklärung.” This last point is, at least for me, the most intriguing, since it suggests that the marshaling of the term “Gegenaufklärung may have been a way of continuing the dispute over what counts as “true enlightenment” after the conventional juxtaposition “true” and “false” enlightenment had begun to fade.

This post is the first of two posts examining English uses of the term prior to Isaiah Berlin’s 1973 article on the topic in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. As in previous posts, I will begin by summarizing Zeev Sternhell’s claims about the history of the term and then proceed to explore what he missed.

Tallying the Occurrences in English

Sternhell’s discussion of the history of the term in English goes as follows:

In English, the term “Counter-Enlightenment” had existed for at least some fifteen years before it was used by Isaiah Berlin, who believed he might have invented it. It was employed by William Barrett, an American professor of philosophy well known in his time, editor of The Partisan Review. Barrett was one of the first American academics to introduce existentialism to his countrymen. It is not surprising that it was precisely in a book on existentialism that this Nietzschean concept appeared. It was, however, undoubtedly due to Berlin’s innate talent for the popularization of formulas that the term “Counter-Enlightenment” became accepted in the English-speaking world.¹

Sternhell bases this history on Robbie Wokler’s contribution to the volume he edited with Joseph Mali on Berlin’s concept.² But by the time of the French publication of Sternhell’s book, Graeme Garrard had already noted that there were two other uses of term prior to Berlin’s dictionary entry.³ Lewis White Beck employed it in his Early German Philosophy (1969) as the title for a chapter that discussed the work of Jacobi, Hamann, and Herder, at least two of whom would loom large in Berlin’s discussion of the concept.⁴ And, prior to its use in Irrational Man, William Barrett used the term in a 1949 article in Partisan Review.⁵

More recently, Henry Hardy turned up four earlier uses of the term, the oldest of which dates from 1908.⁶ With the addition of an appearance of the term in an article by Daniel Aaron (which I turned up several years ago while searching for usages on JSTOR) that was inspired by Barrett’s Partisan Review piece, we wind up with eight occurrences of the term in English prior to Berlin’s 1973 article:

Charles Gray Shaw, The Precinct of Religion in the Culture of Humanity (New York: MacMillan, 1908) 9.
Charles Gray Shaw, “Culture” in James Hastings et. al. (eds), Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh, 1908–26), iv 358.
John Tate Lanning, “The Reception of the Enlightenment in Latin America,” in Arthur Preston Whitaker ed., Latin America and the Enlightenment, (New York, 1942), 86.
Charles Morris, “Empiricism”, Religion, and Democracy,” in Lyman Bryson and Louis Finkelstein (eds), Science, Philosophy and Religion 2nd symposium (New York, 1942), 214
William Barrett, “Art, Aristocracy, and Reason,” Partisan Review XVI, no. 6 (1949): 658–665.
Daniel Aaron, “Conservatism, Old and New,” American Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Summer 1954): 99–110,
William Barrett, Irrational Man; a Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1958).
Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessor (Cambridge: Harvard, 1969), 8, 11, and Chapter 15.

In what follows, I will take a closer look at items 1-4 on this (likely still incomplete) list and see what they tell us about the career of the term “Counter-Enlightenment” in English.

Charles Gray Shaw and the English Appropriation of the Term

I first learned about Charles Gray Shaw’s 1908 usage of the term in May 2011 when David Marshall (who delivered a fine paper on various misinterpretations of Vico as a “counter-Enlightenment” thinker at the same panel at the January 2011 American Historical Association meetings where I’d discussed the context of Barrett’s initial use of the term) altered me that he’d turned up this surprisingly early use of the term while searching on Google. Neither of us could make much sense of how (or for that matter why) Shaw was employing the term and neither of us had the faintest clue as to who Shaw was beyond the brief description that appears under his name on the title page of The Precinct of Religion in the Culture of Humanity: “Professor of Philosophy in New York University. Author of Christianity of Modern Culture.”

As chance would have it, I ran into Shaw’s name again this June in the course of my discussion of the history of the term “scientism” when I stumbled upon his 1919 book The Ground and Goal of Human Life (I was led to the book in the course of trying to make sense of an uptick in the use of this term around 1920). Trying to learn something about his work I searched for discussions of him on JSTOR and, in addition to finding a fair number of (largely unhelpful) reviews of his books, I discovered that he seems to have been a quite productive scholar, publishing regularly in such venues as The International Journal of Ethics, The Biblical World, The North American Review, The American Journal of Theology. I asked a colleague who works on the history of American religion about Shaw and was told that, while the name seemed to ring a bell, he had no idea who Shaw was.

Over the Thanksgiving break I finally did what I should have done months before and searched the New York Times historical database, where I turned up a 1949 obituary with a title that was tailor-made to quicken the pulse of a hard-working member of the Freemasonry of Useless Erudition: “Dr. Charles Shaw, at NYU 42 Years: Philosophy Professor Emeritus, Author and Epigramist Dies — Irked Mussolini.”⁷ A philosophy professor who managed to “irk” Mussolini? Interesting! (usually they just annoy their colleagues).

Here is how the Newspaper of Record summed up the man’s life:

Dr. Shaw was a well-known author, housing authority and homespun epigramist. Born in Elizabeth, N. J. … he was a descendent of John Alden. He took his B. L. degree [sic: the title page of The Precinct of Religion lists Shaw as holding a B.T. degree rather than a B. L.; given Shaw’s initial focus on theological questions, I’m inclined to think that the Times was mistaken] at Cornell University in 1894 and his Ph.D. at New York University three years later. Afterwards he studied at the universities of Jena and Berlin and started in 1899 as an assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University.

In 1904 he was named Professor of Ethics, and in 1920 Professor of Philosophy. He retired in 1941.

One of Dr. Shaw’s pronouncements which caused much discussion was his statement that only morons whistled. He said no great or successful man ever whistled. It was indignantly announced in reply from Rome that Mussolini whistled, which seems to indicate that Dr. Shaw was right, but which caused him to be embarrassed at the time.

Other of his sayings were that laughter would have no place in “a future sober world,” that knickerbocker trousers were “fatal to democracy,” that college boys often know more than their teachers, and that American women had culture but not American men. …

A list of his books follows (11 titles between 1906 and 1937), along with information about his activities as an editor (e.g. he was responsible for something called The 101 World’s Classics). We also are informed that he was a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Ethics and Religion, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and “to many magazines.” The obituary closes with a brief note on his service in the public sphere:

A persistent campaigner for better housing, he devoted much time to slum-clearance projects and served in 1927 and 1928 as secretary of the National Housing Committee for Congested Areas.

This is probably more than anyone needs to know about Shaw, but one point may well be significant: his having studied at Jena and Berlin in the final years of the nineteenth century.

As we saw in the previous installment, the earliest published uses of the term Gegenaufklärung to designate a tradition of thought that emerged in the wake of and in reaction to the Enlightenment date from the 1920s, though the term had begun to turn up in a more polemical content as early as the first decade of the twentieth century. I am leery of placing too much confidence in these dates (I prefer to use the Ngram as a check on rash generalizations, rather than as proof positive of how terms are being used), but it seems plausible that, prior to these published appearances of the term, the concept may have enjoyed a modest currency, either in works that the Ngram has not flagged or in unpublished papers or lectures. So, it is conceivable that, during his time in Jena and Berlin, Shaw might have encountered the term.

What is striking about Shaw’s use of the term — in contrast to the often puzzling examples we found when plowing through the early German uses of — is how familiar it seems. The Precinct of Religion begins with a “Historical Introduction” that is recognizably Hegelian in its provenance:

In modern philosophy, two periods contrived to produce a philosophy of religion: first, there came the age of enlightenment which covered the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; then there followed the period of culture from the French Revolution to the present. Here [i.e., in what Shaw sees as “the age of enlightenment] there was analysis which culminated in the Kantian philosophy; there [i.e., in what Shaw dubs “the period of culture’] was found synthetic movement which had its beginning with German idealism (2).

Shaw, however, stresses that any account of “those modern conditions which have made religious thought possible” must “investigate something more than clearly marked periods and leading personalities”: his goal is to construct an account that explores an ongoing dialectic between “religion” (which has its origins “in the depths of man’s spiritual nature”) and the various forms of “speculative philosophy” that have attempted to articulate this fundamental impulse.

The historical sketch he offers begins with a discussion of the how the “age of enlightenment” (which originates with Descartes’ distinction between mind and body and Hobbes’ “hedonistic” account of morality) gave rise to a “crass system of religious thinking” which,

Ignoring intuition in its zeal for inference, flouting history in its enthusiasm for reason, … failed to penetrate to the psychological essence and spiritual character of human worship (6-7).

German philosophy, however, “was not so premature” in its embrace of Deism and, hence “did not follow the regressive course which modern philosophy elsewhere had been founding” (7). After a few pages that discuss the shortcomings of Deism, we find the following:

Assuming, this we may safely do, that history teaches philosophy in an exemplary fashion, a glance at the counter-Enlightenment will aid in clarifying the modern concept of religion. This period, while not marking out the religious precinct, sufficed to negate the false ideal of rationalists and served to prepare the way for Kant and the modern constructive thinkers. Here may be noted that the attack on the Enlightenment inaugurated by Vico and Voltaire, Hume and Lessing. One hundred years after the appearance of Herbert’s “De Veritate,” Vico produced “Scienza Nuova” as a foundation work in the philosophy of history. Vico criticizes Grotius, Hobbes and Puffendorf among the jurists as those who indicated a false beginning for civilization, while he himself returns to the actual beginning of human culture in the naïve idea of the primitive man. From such a genuine beginning, which saw the poetical rather than the political and the original man, he proceeds to outline the development of mankind according to the threefold plan of naturistic [sic], heroic, human. To the plan of Vico’s new science Voltaire adds no substantial principle, yet his “Essai sur les moeurs des nations” reflects a historical spirit counter to Deism and directed towards the scientific ideals of the present.

Hume and Lessing nullify the programme of natural religion, when one points out that, not reason, but “custom is the great guide of human life,” and the other regards revelation as “the education of human race.” (9-10)

Despite the presence of Vico, this is not quite Isaiah Berlin’s “counter-Enlightenment” (the idea that Voltaire as a “counter-Enlightener” is a bit hard to reconcile with Berlin’s tale of French philosophes and their mostly German opponents).⁸ But it comes close.

Shaw made no further use of the term in The Precinct of Religion, though he did employ it again (as Hardy notes) in the article he wrote on “Culture” for the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics. Perhaps because Shaw focused here on the history of the concept of culture, rather than the relationship between culture and religion, the account is somewhat easier to follow. As before, “the Enlightenment” (and I should note that while Shaw tended to eschew the capital when speaking of “the age of enlightenment,” he consistently employed “the Enlightenment” in his discussion of the period in The Precinct of Religion) is seen as marked by a “rationalistic spirit, political earnestness, and relentless criticism of religion” that “removed it from the Graces” and yielded “a static system of natural religion (Herbert), of natural rights (Grotius), as also a naturalistic system of ethics (Hobbes) and of knowledge (Locke).” Naturally, such an arid and unappealing system of thought was bound to meet with opposition.

This blind rationalism, however, was destined to undergo repudiation, and in the Counter-Enlightenment of Rousseau, Vico, Lessing, and Herder the counter-problem was rehabilitated (358).

Shaw more or less follows the pattern that Jonathan Knudsen (in one of the last works of his much too brief career) detected in nineteenth-century German historicists: their “emptying the Enlightenment of a sense of history” positioned them to appropriate it “exclusively to itself.”⁹ In much the same fashion, Shaw constructs a thoroughly “rationalist” Enlightenment, and then proceeds to slot any eighteenth-century thinker who doesn’t conform to this image into something called the “Counter-Enlightenment.”

There is, however, one difference between this account and Shaw’s earlier book. While Kant appeared in The Precinct of Religion as a “rationalist” member of the Enlightenment, he turns up here as one of the founders of “Romanticism”, the age which finally begins to appreciate the concept of culture:

The age of culture began as Kant emerged from rationalism, and by means of philosophic criticism transcended the conceptual views of the Enlightenment (359).

One might ask, why this change? It would appear that, while Shaw was content to consign Kant to the arid world of the Enlightenment on the basis of his essentially “Deistic” account of religion, he was forced to reposition Kant in his history of culture because Kant employed the term “culture” in the Critique of Pure Reason. Because Shaw takes it as a given that the “blind rationalism” of the Enlightenment ruled out the possibility that those involved in it would have any sense of the importance of “culture,” anyone who invokes the concept of culture is, by definition, not part of the Enlightenment. And thus the lines of division are kept clean and history kept simple.

Counter-Enlightenment as Historical Concept and Contemporary Threat

It is not difficult to understand the appeal of the term “Counter-Enlightenment”: Revolutions breed Counter-Revolutions and the Reformation was met by a Counter-Reformation. Why shouldn’t the Enlightenment get to have a Counter-Enlightenment? After all, since at least 1938 Renaissance scholars have been invoking something called the “Counter-Renaissance.”¹⁰

Used in this fashion, the term “Counter-Enlightenment” resides somewhat uneasily in the no-man’s land between those terms that designate particular periods (e.g., the Renaissance) and those terms that specify distinct intellectual movements (e.g., Surrealism). There are a fair number of other concepts wandering about in that no-man’s land, most of them distinguished by an uncertainty as to whether they are quite robust enough to be treated as marking a complete break with the age that preceded them (as “Romanticism,” in some quarters, is seen as doing vis a vis “the Enlightenment”) or whether they are doomed to play the role of guerrillas condemned to wage an inconclusive battle in the enemy’s country. But we can delay an assessment of the utility of the term “Counter-Enlightenment” until we have completed our survey of the way in which it has been used. For now it may be enough to note a significant difference that appears in the two examples that Henry Hardy picks up from the 1940s.

First, consider John Tate Lanning’s chapter “The Reception of the Enlightenment in Latin America” in the 1942 collection Latin America and the Enlightenment. Having discussed the appropriation of ideas associated with the Enlightenment, he goes on to “look at the opposite side of the coin”: the resistance that Scholastic approaches offered to the “experimentalism” associated with the Enlightenment. Noting that while the “force of inertia operated on the side of the status quo” the same “lethargy which at first retarded philosophical change” also “served to restrain opposition to such innovation.”

Most moderns were astute enough to blend their doctrines with the conventional formulas either to avoid disastrous open clashes or because they were actually part liberal and part conservative. At no definite point, except in individual cases, could one say the Peripatetic ended and the experimental began (85).

In considering such struggles, Lanning notes that “Lima offers an exceptional theatre upon which to observe the play of the counter-Enlightenment” (86). And that is the last time we see the word. Like a good historian, Lanning spends the rest of his chapter exploring the struggles of individuals, individuals who — as he has already hinted — were never completely at one with either “the Enlightenment” or “the Counter-Enlightenment.”

Now consider the way the term is used by Charles W. Morris in his contribution to the Second Symposium on Science, Philosophy and Religion. Morris is not writing history. He sees himself, instead, as engaged in a struggle that may ultimately determine the fate of democracy. Searching for potential converts to the empiricist cause he observes that

there are large groups of persons among the youth, the workers, the artists, the religionists, the scientists, the technologists for whom the older religious and political symbols — claiming a special metaphysical sanction – have lost their force. If there is confusion in contemporary culture, there are also deep sources of energy, frustrated aspirations, new beginnings, movements hovering on the verge of consolation, untapped sources of heroism. If the empiricist can overcome his own frustrations, and develop or encourage others to develop a clear program for living, he may rally these forces for a powerful, integrated, and perhaps successful opposition to the counter-Enlightenment and counter-Reformation which threatens to spread over mankind. (214).

Used in this way, “counter-Enlightenment” refers not to something — be it a period or a movement — that lies somewhere in the past. It designates a contemporary threat, a movement that, if successful, may herald the arrival of a new age of darkness. This is not how Isaiah Berlin used the term, but it is very much the way in which Zeev Sternhell tends to think about the concept when he proceeds to narrate a history of an “anti-Enlightenment tradition” that includes, among its leading figures, someone named Isaiah Berlin.

The context in which Charles W. Morris was using the term “counter-Enlightenment” and the way in which this particular sense of the term was taken up by William Barrett may be of some help in trying to make sense of how Sternhell arrives at this peculiar result. Since this post has gone on long enough (and I have a pile of papers and exams that are about the descend on me), we will have to deal with that in the next installment.

To be continued …

Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) 3 ↩
Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler, eds., Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 93, no. 5, New Series (2003): 13. ↩
Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). ↩
Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) 361-392. ↩
William Barrett, Irrational Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958) 244; Barrett, “Art, Aristocracy, and Reason,” Partisan Review XVI, no. 6 (1949): 663-664. For Garrard’s discussion, see Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006) 2. ↩
This list appears as a footnote in his “Editor’s Preface” to new edition of Berlin’s Against the Current (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) xxv. ↩
“Dr. Charles Shaw, ” New York Times, July 29, 1949, 21. I may have something more to say about Shaw’s dust up with Mussolini in a later post. ↩
For a later discussion of Voltaire that sheds some light on this interpretation (but eschews the term “counter-Enlightenment”) see Shaw, Trends of Civilization and Culture (New York: American Book Company, 1932), 90-91. ↩
Jonathan Knudsen, “The Historicist Enlightenment” in Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, What’s Left of Enlightenment? : a Postmodern Question (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2001). 39-49) ↩
Berlin himself noted that his use of the term Counter-Enlightenment might have been inspired by Hiram Haydn’s The Counter-Renaissance (New York Scribner, 1950). See Baird W. Whitlock, “The Counter-Renaissance,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 20:2 (1958): 434–449 for earlier uses of the term. ↩

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Counter-Enlightenment, History of Concepts, Isaiah Berlin | 2 Comments

Fabricating the “Counter-Enlightenment” — Part II: German Uses 1875 – 1925

Posted on November 17, 2013 by James Schmidt

The first post in this series examined Zeev Sternhell’s claim that Nietzsche “probably invented” the term Gegenaufklärung and noted that (1) Nietzsche’s one use of the term is difficult to reconcile with the subsequent usage of the term that we now associate with Isaiah Berlin and (2) the term had been used by others before Nietzsche, though — once again — in ways that diverge markedly from the current meaning of the term. This post is concerned with Sternhell’s claim that the term “was in common usage in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century.”¹ Once again, evidence in support of Sternhell’s claim turns out to be surprisingly elusive. An Ngram of occurrences of the term between 1880 and 2000 indicates that occurrences of the term in the Ngram database are quite rare prior to the 1920s and it is only after the 1960s that the term began to enjoy what little currency it seems to have (it is worth stressing that, even at its peak of popularity, this is hardly a frequently-used term).

Extending the search to include the phrase “gegen Aufklärung” (“against Enlightenment”) turns up a few earlier occurrences of the phrase (which is hardly surprising), but does little to alter the general picture.²

It might, of course, be argued that the problem lies, not with Sternhell’s assertion, but rather with the corpus of texts searched by the Ngram Viewer. It is possible that Gegenaufklärung was a commonplace in works that, for one reason or another, did not wind up in library collections and, hence, were not part of the corpus of texts searched by the Ngram. It is also conceivable that, while the term entered into common usage during the last decades of the nineteenth century, this was not immediately reflected in printed works. There are, however, reasons to be skeptical about both of these arguments. To understand why, we need to consider two questions that, by assuming that the term was in “common usage”, Sternhell does not seem to have addressed: just who might have been using this term? And how would they have been using it?

What Gegenaufklärer? Whose Gegenaufklärung?

Since its been a while since my last post on this issue (the delay can be partly attributed to my not appreciating just how puzzling the German usage of the term seems to be), let us review what Sternhell has to say about the term:

The term Gegen-Aufklärung was probably invented by Nietzsche, and was in common usage in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. It was no accident that Nietzsche invented this term in order to define the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, for its creation reflected not only his understanding of the intellectual trends of his time but also the fact that it was in the “Nietzsche years” that the Anti-Enlightenment gained momentum and became a veritable intellectual torrent. It was at that time that the antirationalist and antiuniversalist revolution of the end of the eighteenth century came down into the street, adapted to the needs of a society that within a few decades had changed as never before. (The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition 3)

Two different claims are run together here: the first involves the history of the term Gegenaufklärung while the second is concerned with the history of “intellectual trends” at the close of the nineteenth century and their impact on the politics of the period. Sternhell would appear to take it for granted that the alleged “intellectual torrent” of “antirationalist and antiuniversalist” thought was responsible for the alleged (albeit, it would seem, undetectable) popularity of the term Gegenaufklärung. But just how was this supposed to happen?

One conjecture would be that the denizens of the European “street” took up the term as a way of characterizing their “antirationalist and antiuniversalist” program and, since they employed this term in broadsheets, political pamphlets, and other documents that were never archived in libraries, this sudden upsurge in the use of the term was never recorded by Google’s scanners. It takes but a moment’s reflection to see that this story is somewhat implausible. Google has, in fact, scanned a fair number of German periodicals and, even if we assume that all of the texts written by our self-described Gegenaufklärer somehow vanished, it is difficult to see how this “intellectual torrent” could have passed unnoticed (and unmentioned). Further, even if we cling to the unlikely assumption that this Gegenaufklärung occurred without anyone recording it, Sternhell’s account is still plagued by the difficulty of explaining what any of this has to do with Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, after all, was hardly a friend of “the street”: he dedicated the first edition of Human, All Too Human to Voltaire in an attempt to play off an “aristocratic enlightenment” against the “democratic enlightenment” that he associated with Rousseau and the French Revolution.³ So, in the lack of evidence to the contrary, it would seem unlikely that the term Gegenaufklärung was being used at this point by individuals as a way of characterizing their own beliefs.

As an alternative hypothesis we might conjecture that Gegenaufklärung was used, not as a self-description, but instead as a term employed by third parties to designate (a) the “antirationalist and antiuniversalist” beliefs that flooded “the European street,” (b) the more pervasive anti-Enlightenment temper of the times, or (c) anti-Enlightenment sentiments associated with other periods (i.e., the way in which Isaiah Berlin used the term). This account, while somewhat more plausible than the first, still faces the nagging difficulty of explaining why so few examples of this usage are being recorded on the Ngram. We could try to save the hypothesis by conjecturing that there was a lag between the appearance of this “torrent” of anti-Enlightenment thought and the use of the term Gegenaufklärung to designate this general movement. But while this may rescue the hypothesis, it requires us to abandon Sternhell’s claim that Gegenaufklärung was in “common usage” by the close of the nineteenth century. And, of course, this revised version of our alternative hypothesis is hard to reconcile with a lag in the usage of the term Gegenaufklärung that stretches into the 1960s: we would need to see some at least some examples of the term being used in the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century or the first decades of the twentieth and that these usages anticipate the connotations that the term later took on. A search that is restricted to the period between 1875-1926 Google turns up a mere seventeen uses of the term Gegenaufklärung. While this helps answer the question of who was using the term — namely, next to nobody — it still leaves our second question unanswered: how was the term being used? Fortunately, since there are only seventeen uses, it is easy enough to look at them and see what we can find. Unfortunately, what we find is rather rather confusing.

Misplaced Citations

Poking around in the texts that Google links to the Ngram results yields at least one surprise: two of the examples turn out to fall outside the period that we are searching.

In the first case, the passage in question, though published in an 1878 issue of the Zeitschrift für das Privat- und öffentliche Recht der Gegenwart, turns out to be a quotation from 1841 text.⁴ The focus here would appear to be on the rules for determining criminal intent (though I should caution that I am no expert of nineteenth-century German jurisprudence) and, in this context, Gegenaufklärung might best be translated as “counter explanation” (cf. similar usage of the term, in the previous post in this series, in connection with a rejoinder to an article about customs involving bell-ringing).

The other misplaced text appears in what Google alleges to be an 1890 issue of the Neue Rundschau. All Google lets us see is the following snippet (and, why, you might well ask, is Google only letting us see a snippet from a text that dates from 1890? — therein lies a tale …):

Though it is difficult to grasp what the author is arguing from the small portion available, the usage appears quite similar to the way in which the term is used today: “Counter-Enlightenment declares itself Enlightenment” — sounds surprisingly current. There’s a good reason for that: Google’s metadata is faulty. Though Google would have us believe that the text dates from 1890, what we in fact are seeing in the snippet is a 1988 article by the Adorno scholar Hauke Brunkhorst.⁵ There were no issues of the Neue Rundschau published in 1890: at that point the journal was still calling itself the Freie Bühne für modernes Leben. I suspect Google’s error might be traced to the Neue Rundschau’s practice of listing the date of its founding — or rather, the date of the founding of the Freie Bühne — on its front cover; that date seems to have made its way into Google’s cataloging.

Unexpected Usages

Having eliminated two of our seventeen examples, we can move on to only actual nineteenth-century example contained in our sample: Wilhelm von Scherff’s Die Lehre von Krieg: auf der Grundlage seiner neuzeitlichen Erscheinungsformen (1897):

What is being discussed here has nothing to do with what we would call “counter-Enlightenment” but rather with what those schooled in the military arts term “counter-intelligence.”⁶

It is only when we move into the twentieth century that we begin to pick up usages that look more like what we would expect to be finding. But there are also quite a few usages that are likely to trip up the casual reader (and this, in part, explains why it has taken so long to get this post finished: these examples are far more puzzling than I’d suspected).

For a prime example, consider the following usage in the journal Hochland in 1906 (to provide some context, I’ve inserted a selection that runs from pp. 230-231 of the journal — I’ll summarize what seems to be going on below).

The Munich journal Hochland is the sort of place where one might find the counter-Enlighteners that Sternhell expects us to be seeing using the term Gegenaufklärung as a way of announcing their opposition to the Enlightenment. Established in 1903 by the Catholic publicist Carl Muth as a vehicle for an revitalized form Catholicism that — breaking with what Muth saw as the inward piety of ultramontanism — championed a vision of “positive Christianity” that was cross-confessional in its aspirations and wide-ranging in its concerns. Contributors to the journal included such figures as Max Scheler, Theodor Haecker, Sigrid Unset, and Carl Schmitt. The journal would later gain fame for its criticisms (which, understandably, tended to be somewhat covert) of the Nazi regime (it was eventually banned in 1940) and because of Muth’s relationship with Hans and Sophie Scholl and others in the White Rose resistance. But during the teens and twenties it was aggressively nationalist and frequently anti-Semetic — praise for the work of Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain can be found side by side with woodcuts of robust country folk engaged in healthy activities.⁷

While it would make sense to characterize Hochland (at least at certain points in its history) as embracing a program that was opposed to the ideals of the Enlightenment, the one use of the term Gegenaufklärung that Google finds in the journal confounds our expectations. The extracts reproduced above are from an unsigned article on the “dogmatism of free-thinking” that takes aim at Ernst Haeckel’s theories of evolution. Arguing that this demonstrates how “free-thinking” has degenerated into a new form of “dogmatism,” the article suggests that Haeckel’s work is an example of “counter-Enlightenment” thinking. As I noted in an earlier post, this sort of move is not uncommon in nineteenth-century religious critiques of Darwin by Anglophone writers, though their preferred term to describe what Darwin was peddling was “scientism” rather than “counter-Enlightenment” (though, as we shall see in the next post, the two terms turn out to be connected).

We see a similar use of the term in another Catholic journal, the Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland (1912), though without the complete text it is somewhat hard to tell what is going on:

So, at long last, we seem to have located some actual Gegenaufklärer, but none of them seem to be using the term Gegenaufklärung as a way of characterizing their own position. Following the paradigm that was established at the close of the eighteenth century, they present themselves as friends of “true enlightenment.”

Finally, Google provides two snippets from the 1917 issue of Deutschlands Erneuerung, the journal of the Pan-German League, a group whose nationalist, imperialist, expansionist, and anti-Semitic policies are precisely what Sternhell might have had in mind when he assumed that Gegenaufklärung had entered into common usage by the close of the century. Once again, it is difficult to be sure what is going on in the snippets Google provides (and I have trouble lining them up with scans of the journal that area available online, which makes me suspect that Google’s metadata may, once again, be misleading):

My best guess (and I’d be grateful to anyone who wants to offer an alternative reading) is that Gegenaufklärung figures here not as a description of the cause that the League embraces but, rather, as a way of characterizing the program of Wirtschaftliche Aufklärung (“economic enlightenment — or, perhaps, “economic education”?) that it opposes: bourgeois liberties amount to a Gegenaufklärung. The mind boggles: if any journal could be seen as exemplifying the aims of the Gegenaufklärung it would be Deutschlands Erneuerung, but it employs the term, not as a badge of honor, but rather as a pejorative for the positions that others hold.

The Delayed Arrival of the Gegenaufklärung as We Now Know It

It is not until the 1920s that we begin to find uses of Gegenaufklärung that employ the term in the context of discussions of the legacy of eighteenth-century thought. And they tend to use the term for scholarly, rather than polemical, purposes. For example, Google offers the following snippet from Franz Oppenheimer and Bertha Spinder-Gysin’s 1922 System der Soziologie :

Four years later we find the following in the journal Logos: The author’s “if I might say” suggests that the term still has a certain novelty about it, which means that we have probably still not arrived at the point where the term is in “general usage,” but we finally seem to be approaching a point where the term refers to an intellectual movement that is opposed to what we would recognize as “the Enlightenment.” But we are still four decades away from the uptick in usage that we can see in the Ngram that opened this post.

That uptick would seem to be driven by German discussions of Berlin’s work and by Herman Lübbe’s Hochschulreform und Gegenaufklärung, a polemic against the German student movement that argued that the students were engaged in an attempt at “counter-Enlightenment.” I would be inclined to maintain that it is only at this point — some eighty years later than Sternhell suggests — that the term Gegenaufklärung entered into common German usage.

What took it so long? The belated popularity of the term might be explained, in part, by the fact that there was no need for it. Prior to 1965 there were other ways of referring to enemies or the opponents, the simplest of which was just to call them “enemies” or “opponents”:

It is not until 1955 that we begin to see Gegenaufklärung consistently supplanting these more familiar phrases (the brief upsurge of Gegenaufklärung around 1945 seems to be driven, in part, by discussions of the need for “counter-education” in postwar Germany) and, over the course of the next decade, it becomes the preferred term for referring, collectively, to the Enlightenment’s enemies.

What, then, are we to make of this substitution? While it may well amount to little more than a distinction without a difference, invoking the existence of something called a “counter-Enlightenment” would appear to imply something more than the trivial observation that the Enlightenment had enemies and opponents. It suggests that these enemies and opponents were engaged in a common cause, that all of them were making arguments that had, at a minimum, some sort of family resemblance. This, after all, is what Sternhell is attempting to argue: not just that the Enlightenment had enemies, but that these enemies are part of a coherent tradition.

On the other hand, the term “counter-Enlightenment” can also serve as a way of designating the historical period that followed in wake of “the Enlightenment.” We begin to find examples of that usage, in German, in historical studies during the 1920s, when the term begins to be used as a synonym for “Romanticism.” But this less ambitious use of the term does not appear to have caught on. After all, there was already a term that does that particular job quite effectively: namely, “Romanticism” itself. Once again, the only advantage that “counter-Enlightenment” would seem to offer is that it assembles all the opponents of the Enlightenment under a single label. For reasons that remain to be explored, it was not until the 1960s that a significant number of people seemed to have felt the need to do this.

To be continued …

Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) 3. ↩
Beginning the search at 1800 produces a spike for the phrase gegen Aufklärung between 1800-1820, which makes a certain amount of sense but which might also be an artifact of the small number of books from that period that would have been scanned and available for searching. ↩
See Graeme Garrard, “Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment.” The Review of Politics 70:4 (2008): 595–608. ↩
Karl Hiller, Zur Versuchslehre des österreichischen Strafrechts,” Zeitschrift für das Privat- und öffentliche Recht der Gegenwart V (1878) : 657-718 ↩
Hauke Brunkhorst, ” Die Unverzichtbarkeit der Utopie. Zur Rolle der Intellektuellen in dern Kulturellen Wenden der westdeutschen Republik,” Neue Rundschau, 99:1 (1988) 140-156. The full quotation reads, “Währed dessen begnügen sich die konservativen Theoretiker der Regierung mit der Theoretisierung der eingenen Theorielosigkeit,(151) indem die zu begründen versuchen, warum Theorien, aslo Erklärunggen und Begründungen, unnütz und schädlich sind. Sie propagieren die allgemeine Abschaffung des Allgemeinen, arbeiten theoretisch am Verfall von Theorie und denken das Denkverbot. Gegenaufklärung verkünden sie als Aufklärung, dem Affekt gegen die Intellektuellen geben sie intellektuelles Gewicht.” ↩
Wilhelm von Scherff, Die Lehre vom Kriege: auf der Grundlage seiner neuzeitlichen Erscheinnungsformen (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1897). ↩
For a discussion of the journal’s early history and its relationship to broader tendencies in Bavarian Catholicism, see Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism : Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 31-32, 39-44. ↩

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Counter-Enlightenment, History of Concepts | 4 Comments

Kant on “Paradoxical Thinking”

Posted on October 30, 2013 by James Schmidt

Various commitments have conspired to delay the next installment of my discussion of the history of the notion of “counter-enlightenment.” But in the course of my reading, I came across a quote from Kant’s lectures on anthropology that casts a somewhat different light on the idea of “daring to know.” So, I thought I’d share it:

Paradoxical cognitions are the ones that make errors suspect; these cognitions appear strange. Hence, if one judges him, one can learn something new from an author who is paradoxical, because he deviates from the old path and chooses a new one. However, according to reason, such an author is a daredevil, and he exposes himself both to winning and to losing. If he succeeds, he gains the advantage therefrom, if he fails he still deserves credit for that reason, because he had this much daring to take a risk. Someone else, who is not so daring, holds to common opinion in order not to fail.The French are very fond of daring in thinking, as they take a risk and thereby leave themselves open to praise or blame. That is a narrow-minded person who, in an unfinished book containing errors, does not nevertheless see the idea of genius which dared, after all, to say such a thing. One must read such authors who are paradoxical because one finds much that is new in them. [Akademie Ausgabe 25:484-485; trans. by Felicitas Munzel, Lectures on Anthropology (Cambridge 2012) p. 59].

I hope to be back to tracking down later nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century uses of Gegenaufklärung shortly.

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The Fading of “True Enlightenment” (Another Wildcard Search)

Posted on October 18, 2013 by James Schmidt

Apologies for the uncharacteristic flurry of activity on this blog, but Google’s addition of wildcard searches to the Ngram (and some tweaks in how it displays the data) has allowed me to take a quick look at a few issues I’ve explored in earlier posts.

Since wildcard searches can be limited by parts of speech, it is simple enough to collect the various adjectives that have preceded Aufklärung. Here are the results for the period from 1770-1870 (I suspect that none of the data for the eighteenth century should be trusted, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to include it. Again, there’s not a lot that is unexpected here, though dragging the cursor backwards over the Ngram provides an easy way of seeing how the ranking of adjectives change over time. Our old favorite “wahre Aufklärung” (i.e., an enlightenment grounded in religion as opposed to a “false enlightenment” resting on unaided human reason) ranks at the top until 1870, when “weitere Aufklärung” (“further enlightenment”) catches it.

Then, for contrast, look at the results for the period from 1870 to 1920. “Weitere Aufklärung” is still at the top of the list in 1920, but over the course of the half century it is replaced, momentarily by “deutschen Aufklärung” (in the late 1870s) and “sexuelle Aufklärung” in 1907. The former reflects the impact of German unification, the later — of course — is the result of Freud’s Zur sexuellen Aufklärung der Kinder. Note, more generally, that at this point we begin to pick up the differentiation between a “German” and a “French” Enlightenment (a distinction that Hegel drew in the 1820s and, perhaps, is now making its way into general usage.

Finally, let’s look at the period from 1920 to 2000. “Weitere” is still chugging along, but greatly diminished, the distinction between German and French enlightenments has now become canonical, with the German one taking the lead (in German texts, of course). Perhaps the most interesting new addition here is Niklas Luhmann’s formulation “Soziologische Aufklärung” (the fact that the adjective is capitalized suggests that there are references to the title of Luhmann’s book) which takes off a bit before 1980 and leads the pack in 2000.

I should point out that, in all these examples, I’ve turned smoothing off: since we are dealing with very small numbers, I didn’t see the point of making any of these trends look less eccentric than they seem to be.

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Enlightenment and Ngram Wild Card Searches

Posted on October 18, 2013 by James Schmidt

A link on my Twitter feed this morning alerted me to Ben Zimmer’s article in the Atlantic on a new (and welcome) feature that Google has added to the Ngram: wild card searches.

Naturally, I thought I’d try it out with “Enlightenment” and “enlightenment”. Here are the results:

To appreciate what is going on here, it makes more sense to open the Ngram itself in a separate window. In addition to providing a larger image of the Ngram, working from the actual Ngram allows you to take advantage of the new features than Google has added, including the ability to highlight the graph for the individual words by mousing (or, in the case of trackpad users, “tracking”?) over the list of words on the right ride.

While there’s nothing here that alters the general point that I’ve been emphasizing here and elsewhere — namely, that “the Enlightenment” was not a formulation that enjoyed much currency until the post-World War II period (and, at some point, we need to consider alternative ways of designating this period: “Cold War” anyone?). But what is somewhat more unexpected is the ranking of frequency of the various wildcards that precede “Enlightenment.” For example, I would not have thought that “of Enlightenment” beat out “of enlightenment” at some point during the 1990s. Might this be the result of a tendency to turn “Enlightenment” into a general designator for all the mischief allegedly done by “the Enlightenment Project”?

It is also possible to select different names and display only their plots. Clicking on “Scottish Enlightenment” and “French Enlightenment” helps to clarify when it was that the former became more frequent than the latter (early 1980s, it appears). It’s also interesting to click on the least frequently appearing phrases on the list, if only to see how formulations such as “his enlightenment” or “general enlightenment” have been hanging on, at the bottom of the Ngram, since the 1840s (could this be artifact of the continued republication of nineteenth-century novels?). Finally, highlighting “European Enlightenment” suggests that it was not until the 1980s that those working on the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century found it necessary to distinguish their enlightenment from the Buddhist one.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, History of Concepts, Ngrams | 3 Comments

Fabricating the “Counter-Enlightenment” — Part 1: Nietzsche’s Role

Posted on October 14, 2013 by James Schmidt

When asked “Who invented the word ‘counter-Enlightenment?” Isaiah Berlin replied

I don’t know who invented the concept …. Someone must have said it. Could it be myself? I should be somewhat surprised. Perhaps I did. I really have no idea.¹

In the quarter century since this 1988 interview, it has become clearer that the concept Berlin popularized enjoyed a limited usage prior to the publication of his influential 1973 article on the subject in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas.² But almost everything else about the term remains puzzling.

J. G. A. Pocock

Among the larger puzzles is just what it is supposed to designate, a problem nicely captured by J. G. A. Pocock when he asked whether it was intended to refer to “one brand of Enlightenment in opposition to another, or a fixed antipathy to Enlightenment in some final sense of the term?”³ But there are also smaller, and no less puzzling questions, as to how Berlin came to use the term in the first place and what, if anything, his use of the term might have had to do with these earlier uses.⁴ While Pocock’s reservations about the concept (which I share) raise what are, by far, the most significant set of issues, my concern in this and the posts to follow will be with less weighty, but somewhat more easily resolvable, problems involving the history of the term itself. I hope that exploring them may lend further support to Pocock’s suspicions about the utility of this confused and confusing concept.

My plan, then, is to devote a few posts to an examination of earlier uses of the term, both in English and in German, and see how these earlier uses may have influenced Berlin. In the end, we will still be left with a number of mysteries about the term (which, it turns out, has been kicking around longer than I suspected) but one thing seems reasonably certain: the account that Zeev Sternhell offers of the history of the term at the start of his Anti-Enlightenment Tradition gets much of the earlier history of the term wrong. Since his account repeats much of what has become the conventional wisdom about the history of the concept, it seems as good a place as any start. While understanding where and why Sternell’s account goes wrong will not, in itself, explain what led Berlin to use the term, it does help to clarify some of the problems that plague the concept itself.

Sternhell’s History of the Term

Zeev Sternhell’s discussion of what he characterizes as the “anti-Enlightenment tradition” begins with a short account of the history of the term “Counter-Enlightenment.” Drawing, for the most part, on earlier studies he argues:

The term Gegen-Aufklärung was probably invented by Nietzsche, and was in common usage in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. It was no accident that Nietzsche invented this term in order to define the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, for its creation reflected not only his understanding of the intellectual trends of his time but also the fact that it was in the “Nietzsche years” that the Anti-Enlightenment gained momentum and became a veritable intellectual torrent. It was at that time that the antirationalist and antiuniversalist revolution of the end of the eighteenth century came down into the street, adapted to the needs of a society that within a few decades had changed as never before. In English, the term “Counter-Enlightenment” had existed for at least some fifteen years before it was used by Isaiah Berlin, who believed he might have invented it. It was employed by William Barrett, an American professor of philosophy well known in his time, editor of The Partisan Review. Barrett was one of the first American academics to introduce existentialism to his countrymen. It is not surprising that it was precisely in a book on existentialism that this Nietzschean concept appeared. It was, however, undoubtedly due to Berlin’s innate talent for the popularization of formulas that the term “Counter-Enlightenment” became accepted in the English-speaking world. If is term never existed in French, it was perhaps partly because Gegen-Aufklärung was flatly translated in that language as “the reaction to the philosophy of the Enlightenment.” The translators into French were not aware that Nietzsche had just invented an analytical concept of the greatest importance. On the other hand, the term “anti-philosophe” appeared at more or less the time that the encyclopédistes adopted the name “philosophes.” So even if in France they did not speak of an “anti” or “counter” Enlightenment, the idea, from the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, did exist there as elsewhere.⁵

Sternhell makes quite a few claims here (there are at least eight of them, by my count) and their relationship is not always clear. Since I am going to spending some time picking my way through them, let me begin by listing them and briefly noting where the problems in his account reside:

Claim 1. Nietzsche “probably” invented the term: this claim is clearly wrong — there seem to have been a few uses of the word prior to Nietzsche and, more importantly, the claim that Nietzsche used the term in anything approximating the sense in which it would come to be used by Berlin and others is quite problematic
Claim 2. It was in “common usage” in Germany by beginning of the twentieth century: the best evidence I have been able to come up with suggests that this claim is mistaken as well; the term does not seem to enjoy widespread usage until the 1960s and it is difficult to find evidence of even a modest number of uses until the beginning of the 1920s.
Claim 3. Nietzsche’s usage of the term was tied to (a) his understanding of his times and (b) to the spread of the “Anti-Enlightenment” movement: much in this claim is undermined by the failure of claims #1 and #2; it also rests on an interpretation of Nietzsche’s views that both oversimplifies and overstates what he seems to have been doing on the one occasion when he used the term.
Claim 4. William Barrett introduced the term into English around 1958 in the context of a discussion of Nietzsche: this claim is also wrong — Barrett had used the term as early as 1949 and that use was only loosely associated with Nietzsche; further, there turns out to have been at least one other use of the term in English prior to Barrett.
Claim 5. Berlin popularized the term in English: on this point Sternhell is clearly correct.
Claim 6. The term never existed in French: this would also appear to be true, though I am not sure how important it is since, as Sternhell himself notes, there were a few alternatives (both in French and German) that did more or less the same work as “counter-Enlightenment.”
Claim 7. The French were (a) unaware of Nietzsche’s use of the term and hence (b) were deprived of “an analytical concept of the greatest importance”: The first part of the claim is true, if only because no one seems to have been aware of Nietzsche’s alleged invention of the concept. Regarding the second part: I doubt that the French were missing much.
Claim 8. Nevertheless “anti-philosophe” does much the same work as “counter-Enlightenment”: much here hangs on the question of whether “anti-philosophe” and various other kindred terms are, in fact, equivalent to “counter-Enlightenment.” I would argue that they are not: to claim that there was such a thing as a “counter-Enlightenment” is different from maintaining that the Enlightenment had enemies.

I will devote the next few posts to working my way through these claims. This post will examine Sternhell’s claims about Nietzsche’s alleged role in coining the term and glance at one earlier use of the term. Subsequent posts will take up Sternhell’s other claims.

Nietzsche’s Use of the Term Gegenaufklärung

The sole evidence offered by Sternhell for Nietzsche’s having “probably invented” the term “Gegen-Aufklärung” consists of a reference to a footnote in Robert Wokler’s contribution to Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, a collection of essays on the topic that Wokler edited with Joseph Mali.⁶ There would appear to be no indication that Sternhell has actually looked at the Nietzsche quotation itself. Indeed, until beginning work on this series of posts, I hadn’t looked at it either, though, like Sternhell, I was familiar with Wokler’s passing reference to it.

It was my good fortune to have gotten to know Robby Wokler and, in a series of discussions, both in person and via email, we spent a fair amount of time attempting to track down previous uses of the term. We were joined in this hunt by Graeme Garrard, whose Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present receives some shabby treatment in Sternhell’s book.⁷ Robby was content simply to note, at the end of a footnote devoted to arguments about the concept of enlightenment, that Nietzsche had employed the term “Gegen-Aufklärung” in one of his notes from the spring and summer of 1877 (i.e., around the time of the publication of the final, and perhaps most problematic, of his Untimely Meditations, “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth”).⁸ In contrast to Sternhell, Robby did not seem to view the note as amounting to an “invention” of the term; his assumption was that there must have been an eighteenth-century use of the term (I tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade him that this was unlikely).

Sternhell’s claim is considerably more ambitious:

It was no accident that Nietzsche invented this term in order to define the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, for its creation reflected not only his understanding of the intellectual trends of his time but also the fact that it was in the “Nietzsche years” that the Anti-Enlightenment gained momentum and became a veritable intellectual torrent.

While Sternhell’s characterization of what Nietzsche was attempting to do seems sensible enough, it is difficult to square with what Nietzsche actually entered into his notebook.

Here (courtesy of the Nietzsche Channel) is a reconstruction of what Nietzsche jotted down:

Sternhell is right to suggest that Nietzsche’s use of term has something to do with his understanding of contemporary “intellectual trends,” though exactly what he is doing here strikes me as far more puzzing than Sternhell’s brief discussion would have us believe.

Let’s start with a translation:

There are shorter and longer arcs in cultural evolution. The peak of enlightenment corresponds to the peak of counter-enlightenment in Schopenhauer and Wagner. The highpoint of the little arcs come near to that of the greater arc — romanticism.

At first glance, it would seem that the only problematic word here is Bogen, which performs a number of services for Nietzsche. In the immediate context, “arc” seems like the best choice: Nietzsche, after all, immediately draws a series of arcs to illustrate his point. But Bogen also can be translated as “bow” and in his passing discussion of the Enlightenment in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil it is this sense of the term comes to the fore:

Freilich, der europäische Mensch empfindet diese Spannung als Nothstand; und es ist schon zwei Mal im grossen Stile versucht worden, den Bogen abzuspannen, einmal durch den Jesuitismus, zum zweiten Mal durch die demokratische Aufklärung:—als welche mit Hülfe der Pressfreiheit und des Zeitunglesens es in der That erreichen dürfte, dass der Geist sich selbst nicht mehr so leicht als “Noth” empfindet!

The Nietzsche Channel translates this as follows:

To be sure, European man experiences this tension as a state of distress; twice already attempts have been made in the grand style to slacken the bow, once by means of Jesuitism, the second time by means of the democratic Enlightenment:—which, with the aid of freedom of the press and newspaper-reading, might indeed bring it about that the spirit would no longer experience itself so easily as “distress”!

While there is more to say about the implications of Nietzsche’s discussion of the tightening and slackening of bows might have to do with Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, for now it may be enough simply to note the pliability of the word Bogen. My chief interest, however, is with the peculiar diagram that Nietzsche drew to illustrate his account of cultural development: I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

The text would lead us to expect that Nietzsche would go on to draw arcs contrasting the trajectory of Aufklärung and Gegen-Aufklärung (with the latter exemplified by Schopenhauer and Wagner). But that, it would appear, is not quite what he does: instead, we have a series of smaller arcs — the first of which is labelled “Romantik” — and a broader, higher arc that is connected to the name “Wagner.” As Nietzsche explains in the text underneath the drawing, the peaks of these smaller arcs approach (but do not reach) the peak of the larger arc.

Nietzsche’s note would have been easier to understand if the smaller set of arcs had been labeled “Aufklärung” instead of “Romantik”: in that case, Wagner and Schopenhauer could be seen as standing on the great arc of the Gegenaufklärung with the various peaks below representing the smaller arcs of Aufklärung. But that is not what he did. One way of making a bit more sense of the note would be to question whether, in the text below the drawing, Nietzsche intended the word “Romantik” as a specification of the phrase “the larger arc.” Coming at the end of sentence about the relative relationship of larger and smaller arcs, perhaps “Romantik” was intended simply as a suggestion that this might be a way to think about the function of romanticism within the more general process of “cultural evolution” that Nietzsche was sketching (i.e., it amounted to little more than a reminder that romanticism ought to be brought into the discussion at some point). It is also possible that Nietzsche had not initially labelled the two arcs (which were intended only as a way of illustrating the general point about shorter and longer arcs) and only proceeded to do so after having written the final sentence.

But this still leaves us with the problem of sorting out how we are to understand the relationship between “Enlightenment” and “Counter-Enlightenment.” As things stand, we are faced with the difficulty of mapping the opposition between Aufklärung and Gegen-Aufklärung onto the opposition between romanticism on the one hand and Schopenhauer and Wagner on the other. And there is no way of doing that if we continue to employ the terms Aufklärung and Gegen-Aufklärung as equivalent to the distinction between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. For that would force us to see either Wagner and Schopenhauer or romanticism as associated with the Enlightenment. And that seems quite implausible.

There is, however, on final option. It is possible that, in this particular context, “enlightenment” may not be best way of translating Aufklärung: perhaps Nietzsche was using it, not to designate the movement that we know as “the Enlightenment,” but instead in the broader sense of conveying information or as educating someone about something. Whatever its shortcomings, this interpretation of the text at least has the virtue of echoing the way in the which Schopenhauer had been characterized in the third of the Untimely Meditations: “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” (“Schopenhauer as Educator”). The term Aufklärung turns up three times in section 5 of the discussion and is used there in the more general sense of “enlightening” or “informing” someone about something. I am not particularly wedded to this interpretation and would be interested in seeing what others might make of Nietzsche’s note. But this reading does allow us to make a bit more sense of Nietzsche’s text and the diagram that he draws, even though it comes at the price of forcing us to abandon the idea that Nietzsche is discussing the relationship between what we could call “the Enlightenment” and “the Counter-Enlightenment.”

In any case, the one lesson that can be taken away from this is that the text with which we are dealing is, after all, a note in a notebook. It was something that was unlikely to have been seen by anyone during Nietzsche’s lifetime and it is possible that Nietzsche jotted it down in considerably less time than I have spent discussing it. All of this is enough to suggest that Sternhell’s claim that Nietzsche’s use of the term amounts to the “invention” of the concept of “the counter-Enlightenment” is a bit of a stretch. And, as we shall see in the next post, his further claim that it was “no accident” that Nietzsche invented the term at this particular moment amounts to little more than whistling in the dark.

“Gegenaufklärung” Before Nietzsche

It might, however, be argued that Sternhell was simply claiming that Nietzsche invented the term — rather than the concept — of Gegenaufklärung and that his attaching of this term to Wagner and Schopenhauer, while perhaps not entirely consistent with its subsequent uses, nevertheless served as a starting point for what would go on to become a fully-developed critique of the Enlightenment. But this claim is also problematic: for the word Gegenaufklärung appears to have been in use prior to Nietzsche’s note, though (as I have argued may also have been the case with Nietzsche) the word does not appear to have been used to designate the concept “Counter-Enlightenment” as we now understand it.

Take, for instance, this brief note from the Augsburger Tagblatt of April 14, 1835 (441-442), which seems to have been written in response to a earlier article having to do with the functioning of church bells. It reads, in full,

Dem Einsender des Aufsatzes, das Schlagwerk der St. Stephansthumuhr betreffend, diene zur wohbedürftigen Aufklärung, das ausser ihm, niemand weiss, dass das Viertelschlagwerk jemals auf das Chorglöcklein geschlagen habe, sondern früher wie jetzt auf die sogenannte Messglocke schlug und noch schlägt. Als Beweis diene: dass weder an dem Glockenstuhl noch an dem Chorglöcklein selbst nicht die mindeste Spur von einem ehemaligen Schlagwerke zu finden ist; an der Messglocke hingegen sind vom Hammer so tiefe Narben geschlagen, das man im vorigen Jahre für gut fand, diese Glocke berreits zum zweitenmale zu verrückern, wobei bemerkt wird, dass wenigstens ein Jahrhundert nötig ist, bis von Schalgwerk eine solche Narbe entsteht. Da übrigens das Chorglöcklein kleinen ist, und daher wohl einen höhern, keineswegs aber hellern oder stärkern Ton gibt als die Messglocke, auch zu der Stundenglocke, der grossen Distanz wegen, in ungewöhnlichen Tonverhältnisses steht, so ist nicht einzusehen, warum eine Abänderung hätte vorgenommen werden sollen, und man bittet deshalb den verehrlichen Herrn Einsender um gefällige Gegenaufklärung.

I will not even attempt a translation of this tedious discussion of the finer points of bell ringing, but instead will simply note that what the author is doing amounts to providing some “contrary information” (Gegenaufklärung) to the “enlightenment” offered in an earlier article in the journal. Searches of German books from the first half of the nineteenth century using both Google and the search engine of the Hathi Trust turn up a few other appearances of the word, though trying to figure out the variety of ways in which the term was used would require a good deal more time than I can spare at the moment, especially since the search engine on the Google Books site seems to be having some problems distinguishing between “Gegenaufklärung” and the much more common — and much less interesting — phrase “gegen Aufklärung.”)⁹

My suspicion is that while we are likely to find scattered occurrences of the word Gegenaufklärung during the first half of the nineteenth century, it is unlikely that the contexts in which it is used are going to be ones in which its usage amounts to an invocation of what we would understand by “Counter-Enlightenment.” It is clear that, by the middle of the nineteenth century the Enlightenment had accumulated any number of enemies. What is far from clear is that anyone found it necessary to lump all these enemies together into something called “the Counter-Enlightenment.”

But the best evidence for maintaining that the idea that there was such a thing as a “Counter-Enlightenment” arrived far later than we sometimes assume can be found by looking for appearances of the term during a period when, if Sternhell’s second claim is correct, we should have no problems in seeing instances of it: the latter part of the nineteenth century. My next post will take a look at that period and see what, if anything, we can learn about how Gegenaufklärung was being used in the wake of Nietzsche’s alleged invention of the term.

To be continued …

Isaiah Berlin and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (New York: Scribners, 1991) 69-70 ↩
Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner’s, 1968-73) Volume II:100 (reprinted in Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking, 1980) 1). ↩
J.G.A. Pocock, “Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, revolution and counter-revolution; a eurosceptical enquiry,” History of Political Thought XX, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 132. ↩
I’ve dealt with some of these questions in a conference paper that can be downloaded from Academia.edu.↩
Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) 3. ↩
Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler, eds., “Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 93, no. 5, New Series (2003). ↩
See Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006) . Sternhell’s complaint against Garrard (see 446-447) is that his book’s agenda is “the deconstruction of the Enlightenment and the Anti-Enlightenment into an infinite number of Enlightenments and Anti-Enlightenments” and that Garrard “agrees with the disastrous assessment of the Enlightenment by John Gray, who like himself is also a liberal of the school of Isaiah Berlin” (the latter seems to be decisive for Sternhell). Garrard, in fact, spends some time criticizing Gray. For Garrard’s response, see “Review Article: The War Against the Enlightenment,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 2 (April 1, 2011): 277–286. ↩
There is much to be said about Nietzsche’s complicated stance towards “the Enlightenment” itself, but I would prefer not to open that can of worms here. For Garrard’s take on it see “Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment,” The Review of Politics 70, no. 04 (December 2008): 595–608. ↩
A search of the Google scans archived by the Hathi Trust turns up a few hits for Gegenaufklärung prior to 1850, but access to the texts themselves is blocked for copyright reasons. As a result, there is no way of know what is in the texts without actually tracking down physical copies. ↩

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Counter-Enlightenment, History of Concepts, Isaiah Berlin, Nietzsche, romanticism | 9 Comments

Ironic Enlightenment? Voltaire, Fussell, and the Neverending End of the Age of Irony

Posted on September 30, 2013 by James Schmidt

Readers of this blog may have noted a certain slackening of activity. The explanation is simple enough: September arrived and, with it, the opening of the fall term (or, as one of my more jaded friends likes to call it, “the resumption of hostilities”). In other lines of work the end of summer signals the beginning of the harvest season, and something akin to that has been slowing my posting as well.

I began this blog in January with three purposes in mind. First, I saw it as a place where I could force myself to confront various stumbling blocks that needed to be dealt with in order for me to finish off some of the things I’m working on (that was the point of my series on Foucault and Habermas). Second, I thought it might serve as a convenient place to deal with provocations having to do with the topics on which I work that turn up in other venues (e.g., annoying commencement addresses by literary editors of certain New York magazines). Finally, I figured I could use it to rid myself of some work that I’d done that wasn’t going anywhere else (for example, my attempt to figure out whether Thomas Mann actually wrote a review of Dialectic of Enlightenment for the New York Times). The blog has been surprisingly effective in fulfilling my first and second aims and, as a result, has yielded quite a few half-baked ideas that I am in the process of revising for publication — which, to mix the metaphors, means that I, too, have some harvesting to do.

For the past week I’ve been kicking around various topics, but finding little that was coming together quickly enough to justify my spending further time on it given the press of other commitments. Then, a few days ago, a colleague (for reasons I don’t quite understand) posted a link to a year-old article from the New York Times by Christy Wampole, a professor of French at Princeton University on “How to Live without Irony.” I should know better than to rise to the bait, especially when the bait is now over a year old, but coincidentally (though, it bears emphasizing, not at all ironically) Wampole’s article dangled before my eyes at the very moment when as I was teaching Paul Fussell’s Great War and Modern Memory in my course on “Catastrophe and Memory” and also finishing up a discussion of Voltaire in my course on the European Enlightenment. This was more than enough to get me thinking about (1) why the New York Times has such an affection for discussions (in most cases, critical) of irony, (2) the place of irony in Voltaire and, more generally, in the Enlightenment, and (3) Paul Fussell. In short: I was hooked.

On the Eternal Return of the End of the Age of Irony

In the immediate aftermath of September 11 attacks, Roger Rosenblatt published an essay in Time magazine arguing that the one good thing that might emerge from the attacks was the “end of the age of irony.” Shortly thereafter the New York Times published one of the smarter rejoinders: Michiko Kakutani’s October 9, 2001 reflections on the role of irony in public life. Writing barely a month after the attacks Kakutani noted that irony was still with us and, appealing to Fussell’s discussion of the role of irony, reminded readers that this might not be a bad thing: irony, he noted, had long served as “a potent weapon for delineating a fractured and frightening world.”

One of the good things about reading Wampole’s account of the virtues of living without irony roughly a year after it initially appeared is the slackening the outrage reflex that attacks on irony seem to trigger in those of us who, for better or worse, find the need to say good things about a bad attitude. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but cold bile is about as appetizing as year-old bait. In my case, the urge to argue with Wampole’s piece was quickly (but, unfortunately, temporarilty) supplanted by a curiosity about how often the Times had found it necessary to deal with “irony.” That question was easily answered: according to the ProQuest Historical Newspapers Database it appears in the title of 575 articles.

And what a peculiar lot of articles they are! A fair number not only defended irony, but practiced it in their title: see, for example, Andy Newman’s “Irony is Dead. Again. Yeah, Right” (Novemeber 23, 2008) and Meghan O’Rouke, “The End of Irony” (August 27, 2006), a review of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (“a masterly comedy of manners — an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following Sept. 11”).

At some point in my voyage backward though the database I decided it might be more interesting to start from the other end and skipped to the oldest article: a correction dating from the May 22, 1861 (bless the Times, it’s been owning up to its mistakes for as long as it’s been making them) cautioning readers that “irony and badinage are the most hazardous of weapons for promiscuous use.” As if to confirm the article’s warning that, while such devices may “gratify and amuse a few, they confound many, and to the larger number they are as unintelligible as the Vedas,” the third oldest item (“Is it Irony?”, July 28, 1873), struggled to make sense of an piece in a “Georgia Democratic journal” welcoming the emigration from the North (“We want Yankee skill, Yankee ingenuity, money and muscle”) while at the same expressing some reservations about the suitability of the “politics,” “religion,” and “civilization” of the welcomed emigrants. All of this is enough to suggest that, the arc of history of irony is, indeed, long (in the case of the struggle between Times and ironists it runs from unreconstructed Georgia Democrats to Brooklyn hipsters) and it bends towards snark.

Welcome to the Desert of the Ironical!

The reception to Wampole’s advice on how to live without irony more or less confirmed her thesis that we are living in a ruthlessly ironic age: lots of people posted lots of snarky comments about it (and, sometimes, her: hipsters don’t take kindly to be criticized by academics). Indeed, when I started reading her piece I found it difficult to shake the feeling that the whole thing was itself an example of the disease it sought to battle. Consider the opening:

If irony is the ethos of our age — and it is — then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.

It is as if having initially written “If irony is the ethos of our age, then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living,” the author chose to disguise the familiar comp-lit tease of smuggling arguments into a text by disguising them as conditionals: note the strategically inserted validity claim (“and it is”) assuing readers of the truth of the supposition and the veracity of the speaker. I’m sure that echt Habermasians can do a better job than me of sorting out what is going on here, but it reminded me of the opening of one of the comedian Jonathan Katz’s more complex (and riskier) jokes: “A young polar bear came home from school — true story — and …”

One of the peculiar features of discussions of “the end of the age of irony” is that everyone appears convinced that theirs is a particularly, if not uniquely, ironical age. For example, Wampole writes,

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free.

Much, I suppose, hangs on “relatively,” but it bears remembering that the “age of irony” whose end Roger Rosenblatt announced in September 2001 was the very same age that Wampole characterizes as “relatively irony-free”: Rosenblatt took some solace in the prospect that the 9-11 attacks ended the reign of Seinfeld and, presumably, promised to choke off Curb Your Enthusiasm after a single season. But, though every recent season of Curb seems as if it will be the last, it somehow manages to keep on going. The same would seem to be true for both “Age of Irony” and the attempt to end it.

Searching for examples of individuals who live nonironic lives, Wampole offered the following:

Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: “Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.”

Since I am coming late to this game, I suspect that her proposed models have, by now, been snarkily criticized. But the claim Wampole attributes to Harrison, which views irony as a rhetorical device destined to be burned away with the ascent of “the real” (or, as the Lacanians like to say, “the Real”), is worth questioning.

As everyone knows, the term “ironic” (or, as they liked to say in the eighteenth century, “ironical”) can be used to characterize both speech acts and situations. This suggests that designating something an “Age of Irony” could either mean that the age was dominated by a particular form of rhetoric (i.e., the “Age of Irony” would be an “Age of Snark”) or an age distinguished by situations that regularly turn out otherwise (and generally worse) than expected. For Wampole, the particular curse of our ironic age is that the rhetorical form has increasingly come to structure the ways in which people interact.

Throughout history, irony has served useful purposes, like providing a rhetorical outlet for unspoken societal tensions. But our contemporary ironic mode is somehow deeper; it has leaked from the realm of rhetoric into life itself.

But while Wampole focuses on the leakage of rhetoric into life, it might be worth considering whether, for at least the last century, the flow has been moving in the other direction.

War as Ironic Action

Near the start of The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell observes,

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

Here, in two sentences, we find much of what makes The Great War and Modern Memory so problematic — e.g., Fussell’s tendency towards rash generalizations, backed up by little more than the force of his writing — along with what, in spite of its problems, makes the book so compelling: while we know how to pick its nits, we also suspect that, in the end, the book is stronger than we are.

A colleague of mine who works on colonial American history once responded to a proposal that we inaugurate a program in “twentieth-century studies” by explaining, at some length and at an increasing volume, that the twentieth was the most overrated century in history. He closed by asking: “What was it good at aside from killing people?” (I was tempted to suggest “string quartets,” but decided against it). He had a point: the short twentieth century ultimately boiled down to two periods of slaughter interrupted by pauses devoted to the preparation for even greater slaughter. After four decades of preparing for a war that, by eliminating the human species, would ironically fulfill the boast of the “war to end all wars” that launched the century, an escape route opened.

Picking his way through the wreckage of its opening engagements, Fussell produced a powerful account of what this thug of a century was up to. It is hardly surprising that, when discussing Fussell’s work with students, I inevitably find myself invoking Walter Benjamin’s account of the angel of history. Rubble was already accumulating at the angel’s feet long before August 1914, but events like the Battle of the Somme accelerated its grown exponentially. And far from marking the “end of the age of irony,” the additional rubble that arrived on September 11, 2001 might better be seen as its continuation through the novel means of box cutters and airliners. For who, aside from the terrorists, could have known that the established procedures for dealing with hijackers — namely, assuming that they would, at some point, attempt to land the planes and, at that point and only at that point, could attempts to extricate the hostages begin — would be so utterly inadequate to the demands of the situation?.

One of the lessons of The Great War and Modern Memory is that, far from being a bit of fog destined to be burned away by the blazing light of “the Real,” the irony that permeates the works of the poets who fought in the Great War was a response to a reality that was nothing if not flamboyantly ironic (for an example, see Fussell’s stunning summary of the opening of the Battle of the Somme). This may explain why Fussell is at his best with ironists like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but is less successful in his discussion of Wilfred Owen, a chapter that is further weakened by his need to drawn lines that lead from the literature of the Great War to the literature of his own war (in this case, the blood-drenched bathing scene in Catch-22).

As an example of how Sassoon went about the work of responding to the irony of the situations into which he had been thrown, consider “Fight to a Finish”:

The boys came back. Bands played and flags were flying,
And Yellow-Pressmen thronged the sunlit street
To cheer the soldiers who’d refrained from dying,
And hear the music of returning feet.
“Of all the thrills and ardours War has brought,
This moment is the finest.” (So they thought.)

Snapping their bayonets on to charge the mob,
Grim Fusiliers broke ranks with glint of steel.
At last the boys had found a cushy job.

* * * * *

I heard the Yellow-Pressmen grunt and squeal;
And with my trusty bombers turned and went
To clear those Junkers out of Parliament.

Here, in response to a “real” that was presenting him with any number of ironic and unwelcome twists, Sassoon took his revenge by imagining another set of circumstances that also take an ironic turn: a parade to welcome home the heroes that veers off in an unexpected direction when the heroes decide it is time to settle some scores.

Fussell’s cavalier use of the Imperial War Museum Archives to expand his account beyond the group of soldier poets whose works he had mastered has its critics. As Leonard Smith noted in a 2001 History and Theory article,

In a disarmingly candid explanation of his methodology provided in the Afterword to the 2000 edition of The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell united his evidence and experience as combatant and as scholar. He referred to his summer of work in the records of the Imperial War Museum, which figured so little in the book itself, but so prominently in how he remembered writing it. If we take this memory at face value, Fussell knew what he was looking for before he read a single document:

“I was searching for displays of language that might help define the similarity of infantry experience in the two world wars and the problem of containing it within words. While reading through this collection I was struck repeatedly by the similarity (almost the identity, for the ground forces) of the two wars.”
Experience provided evidence that he went to the archives simply to confirm. Archival research became a wonderfully self-fulfilling prophecy. With such assurance as to the truthfulness of the form of the story he wanted to tell, all he needed was some additional content.¹

Smith is right to suggest that there was a good deal of projection going on in The Great War and Modern Memory, especially in its handling of archival materials. Fussell would later explain how his experiences as an infantryman in the France during the even worse war sired by the Great War taught him to write — “about Walt Whitman or Samuel Johnson, about the theory of comparative literature or the problems facing the literary biographer” — with the voice “of the pissed-off infantryman, disguised as a literary and cultural commentator.” Working his way through the letters from soldiers in the IWM, this pissed-off infantryman latched onto the ones written by kindred spirits from an earlier time and ignored those that didn’t provide what he sought to find. “Military memory,” as he explained in the book’s final section, has been carefully trained to focus on the mission at hand.

But an afternoon clicking through the collection of manuscripts available on Oxford University’s digital archive of Great War poets suggests that this is more than enough material in the archives that confirm the insights that Fussell arrive at through his more reckless approach. Consider one of Sassoon’s less successful efforts: “The Redeemer.”

Darkness: the rain sluiced down; the mire was deep;
It was past twelve on a mid-winter night,
When peaceful folk in beds lay snug asleep;
There, with much work to do before the light,
We lugged our clay-sucked boots as best we might
Along the trench; sometimes a bullet sang,
And droning shells burst with a hollow bang;
We were soaked, chilled and wretched, every one;
Darkness; the distant wink of a huge gun.

I turned in the black ditch, loathing the storm;
A rocket fizzed and burned with blanching flare,
And lit the face of what had been a form
Floundering in mirk. He stood before me there;
I say that He was Christ; stiff in the glare,
And leaning forward from His burdening task,
Both arms supporting it; His eyes on mine
Stared from the woeful head that seemed a mask
Of mortal pain in Hell’s unholy shine.

No thorny crown, only a woollen cap
He wore — an English soldier, white and strong,
Who loved his time like any simple chap,
Good days of work and sport and homely song;
Now he has learned that nights are very long,
And dawn a watching of the windowed sky.
But to the end, unjudging, he’ll endure
Horror and pain, not uncontent to die
That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.

He faced me, reeling in his weariness,
Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.
I say that He was Christ, who wrought to bless
All groping things with freedom bright as air,
And with His mercy washed and made them fair.
Then the flame sank, and all grew black as pitch,
While we began to struggle along the ditch;
And someone flung his burden in the muck,
Mumbling: ‘O Christ Almighty, now I’m stuck!’

The famous Sassoonian irony is once again on display here, though at a more leisurely pace: the long account of a vision of Christ in the trenches, appearing in the guise of an innocent country chap (perhaps a lad rather like the young, horsey Sassoon?) is shattered in those final lines when “someone” throws down his (or His?) particular cross and takes the Lord’s name in vain. It works, but lines like “not uncontent to die” seem rather strained: Sassoon, after all, had put something similar (“refrained from dying”) in the mouths of the soon to be gored yellow-pressmen of “Fight to a Finish.”

The Oxford archive has an earlier draft of the poem that offers some hints as to why the poem may not hold together.² Originally, the last seven lines read:

I say that He was Christ, who wrought to bless
All groping things with one evangel sweet,
Choosing a terrible path for his young feet.
Then the flame there died, and all grew black as pitch,
And we began to struggle along the ditch;
But in my heart I knew that I had seen
The suffering spirit of a world washed clean.

To the very end the vision of the Christ of the trenches remains intact. No irony here: the soldier/Christ’s suffering holds out a promise of redemption, echoing the words of the dead German soldier in Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

This is not the sort of thing that, at least at this point in his life (I don’t know the poetry that he wrote, late in his life, after he embraced Catholicism), Sassoon was able to pull off. It is as if Sassoon found himself trying to write the sort of poetry that Owen would go on to write — poetry that provided Benjamin Britten with words he could seamlessly intertwine into the text of the Latin Mass for Dead. But then, like his soldier chap, Sassoon threw off this burden, cursed, and decided to write a poem of a different sort.

From Theodicy to Irony

When teaching my course on Catastrophe and Memory, I start the discussion of the Battle of the Somme with Edmund Blunden’s “Report on Experience”:

I have been young, and now am not too old;
And I have seen the righteous forsaken,
His health, his honour and his quality taken.
This is not what we were formerly told.

I have seen a green country, useful to the race,
Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,
Even the last rat and the last kestrel banished –
God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

I knew Seraphina; Nature gave her hue,
Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.
I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;
She turned to harlotry; – this I took to be new.

Say what you will, our God sees how they run.
These disillussionments are His curious proving
That He loves humanity and will go on loving;
Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.

Blunden’s poem serves two purposes: it gives the students a first taste of the irony that would move to center stage when we turn to Fussell’s book and it provides them a glimpse of that great (and seemingly) nonironic trope : theodicy.

I started teaching versions of the course during the Spring term of 2005 and, since that year marked the 250th anniversary of the Lisbon Earthquake, I thought I would begin the course with travelers’ reports on the earthquake and British sermons trying to make sense of it before moving on to Candide. As I was cleaning up the syllabus at the end of December 2004, the Indian Ocean Tsunami struck and, in its wake, an outpouring of articles in the New York Times and elsewhere debating the question of theodicy. History, as Samuel Clemens may or may not have said, “does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

Classes also sometimes manage to rhyme: this term I went from teaching Fussell in the morning to discussing Voltaire in the afternoon. I typically begin that discussion with the Largillière portrait and with accounts of his face by contemporaries: Friedrich Melchior Grimm’s description of his witty, caustic expression and his sparkling mischievous eyes, John Morgan’s observation that he had “a very sagacious but at the same time a comical look. Something satirical and very lively in his action …, ” the Paris police dossier that reports that he looked “like a satyr” and — of greatest relevance for this discussion — John More’s comment that “an air of irony never entirely forsakes his face, but may always be observed lurking in his features.”

Voltaire, of course, was no hipster, but he was hardly unschooled in the art of irony. I’ve written, in an earlier post, of my admiration for David Wootton’s introduction to his Candide translation. The same goes for Wootton’s article in the autumn 2000 History Workshop Journal “Unhappy Voltaire, or ‘I Shall Never Get over It as Long as I Live'”, an unflinching examination of the reasonable, but somehow overlooked, possibility that when Voltaire (then are 32) attributed his poor physical condition to his having, as a boy, been “buggered” by his Jesuit teachers “to such a degree that I shall never get over it as long as I live,” his explanation was not, as René Pomeau supposed, a clever comment aimed at “horrifying an elderly English gentlewoman.” Fussell, like Sassoon before him, learned irony in the army. Voltaire learned it from his teachers at Louis le Grande, put it to good use in Candide and, when necessary, was quite capable of turning it off (cf. the opening of the Treatise on Toleration).

The perennial slander against the Enlightenment has been that it was marked by a shallow rationalism that was unable to comprehend those depths of human experience that would eventually be plumbed by the Romantics and the various other deep and, of course, serious thinkers that followed in their wake. Wootton’s discussion of Voltaire’s achievement suggests a different way of thinking about what has annoyed so many people for so long about the Enlightenment and also what may have eluded those of us who fancy ourselves friends of the Enlightenment: though the eighteenth century could not match the achievements of the twentieth in mass slaughter, it was a rough time. The most successful of its survivors mastered a way of responding to it that found ways of miming its horrors and, in that way, sought to break their hold. Candide recounts catastrophes that would be unbearable were they not turned into a running joke about the failings of this best of all possible worlds. Perhaps it matters that, prior to applying the irony that he learned in the army to the experiences of soldier poets in the Great War, Fussell schooled himself in eighteenth-century English literature. There are worse places to learn how to marshall the resources of verbal irony against the situational irony that would seem to be our fate. Which suggests some advice for those who find the need to complain about irony: get serious about it.

Leonard V. Smith, “Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: Twenty-Five Years Later,” History and Theory 40, no. 2 (May 2001): 254. ↩
I assume that this draft is well-known among Sassoon scholars (this isn’t my field, so I don’t know), but Fussell appears to have been unaware of it [added 2014-12-10: it turns out, however, that Jay Winter was — see J. M Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 218] ↩

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged religion, Voltaire | 2 Comments

Securing the Borders: On the Genealogy of Scientism (Part II)

Posted on September 19, 2013 by James Schmidt

Leon Wieseltier’s response to Steven Pinker’s rejoinder to Wieseltier’s earlier attempt to defend the humanities from the depredations of what he terms “scientism” prompted me, in my previous post, to offer a few thoughts on the history of this peculiar concept. My intent had been to devote this post to a discussion how the term functions and then get back to the normal business of this blog, which — as the tagline in the upper right hand corner explains — is concerned with the Enlightenment “as historical period and continuing project.” But, as it turns out, I seem to have gotten myself into deeper waters than I’d expected, in part because the history of discussions of the difference between “science” and “scientism” turns out to be more complicated and of greater relevance for my own work than I’d initially assumed.

Over the last week I have received a number of helpful comments, both on and off this blog, which persuaded me that it might be worth saying a bit more about the history of “scientism” before pressing onward to explore how the term functions. I suspect that this may not be the last thing I will have to say about these matters (there are some interesting articles from the 1940s by Friedrich von Hayek and Eric Voegelin that are worth discussing) though it will (I hope) be my final comments on the exchange between Wieseltier and Pinker. They get enough attention without my help.

Yet More on the History of “Scientism”

Last week’s discussion was confined to what I had gleaned from a few of the examples turned up in an Ngram that, in response to Wieseltier’s discussion of these matters during his commencement address at Brandeis, I’d thrown together earlier in the summer. In the interest of brevity (which, I’m afraid, has not been one of the virtues displayed in my posts), I’d confined my examples to usages of the term in English. But, as Dan Edelstein kindly pointed out, the ARTFL database turns up a few intriguing French examples. Here’s the list Dan sent me:

Fourier, Charles, 1772-1837. Théorie des quatre mouvements (1808)
Bergson, Henri Louis, 1859-1941, La pensée et le mouvant (1903)
Sorel, Georges, 1847-1922, Matériaux d’une théorie du prolétariat (1914)
Bouglé, Célestin, 1870-1940, Leçons de sociologie sur l’évolution des valeurs (1922)
Massis, Henri, 1886-1970. Jugements. T. 1 (1923)
Massis, Henri, 1886-1970, Jugements. T. 2 (1924.)
Bourget, Paul, 1852-1935, Nos actes nous suivent (1926)
Du Bos, Charles, 1882-1939, Journal. Tome III, 1926-1927 (1927)
Maritain, Jacques, 1882-1973, Primauté du spirituel (1927).
Febvre, Lucien, 1878-1956, Civilisation – Le mot et l’idée (1929)
Ruyer, Raymond, 1902-1987, Esquisse d’une philosophie de la structure (1930.)
Maritain, Jacques, 1882-1973, Humanisme intégral: problèmes temporels et spirituels d’une nouvelle chrétienté (1936)
Mounier, Emmanuel, 1905-1950, Manifeste au service du personalisme (1936)
Duhamel, Georges, 1884-1966, Les maîtres 1937)
Weil, Simone, 1909-1943, L’enracinement (1951)

The appearance of the term in the texts by Bourget, Maritain, Mounier, and Weil is not entirely surprising: my quick and dirty survey of the English usage indicated that a fair number of the early uses of the term occurred in clerical and theological critiques of Darwin. In these discussions “scientism” denoted an advance of scientific forms of reasoning (as we shall see, defining what exactly this means is no small matter) beyond their proper limits (as we shall also see, determining these “proper limits” is no walk in the park either). The relevant passage from Bergson conforms to this general pattern of usage:

Nous avons seulement demandé à la science de rester scientifique, et de ne pas se doubler d’une métaphysique inconsciente, qui se présente alors aux ignorants, ou aux demi-savants, sous le masque de la science. Pendant plus d’un demi-siècle, ce « scientisme» s’était mis en travers de la métaphysique. Tout effort d’intuition était découragé par avance : il se brisait contre des négations qu’on croyait scientifiques. Il est vrai que, dans plus d’un cas, elles émanaient de vrais savants. Ceux-ci étaient dupes, en effet, de la mauvaise métaphysique qu’on avait prétendu tirer de la science et qui, revenant à la science par ricochet, faussait la science sur bien des points. Elle allait jusqu’à fausser l’observation, s’interposant dans certains cas entre l’observateur et les faits. C’est de quoi nous crûmes jadis pouvoir donner la démonstration sur des exemples précis, celui des aphasies en particulier, pour le plus grand bien de la science en même temps que de la philosophie.

What we have here is a proposal for an entente cordiale between science and the discipline into which it is seen as encroaching (i.e., metaphysics). The terms of the proposed treaty request that science remain content to be science, rather than dabbling in a “métaphysique inconsciente” that Bergson — like others before him — dubs “scientism” (the presence of the scare quotes around the term may suggest that Bergson has a certain discomfort with this neologism, a discomfort that unfortunately began to wear off as the century advanced).

It shames me to say that I am not particularly well-acquainted with Sorel’s work (which is a cumbersome way of saying that the books are on my shelf but I’ve done little more than turn the pages and come away perplexed). To the extent that I can make sense of what he is arguing, what we are seeing here is the same sort of demarcation between a science that is going about its proper business and a science that, in its haste to annex new territory, plunges into “scientism”:

La saine interprétation des symboles que nous examinons ici, se heurte aux illusions acceptées par un très grand nombre de nos contemporains, auxquels on a persuadé qu’il est possible de se rendre compte scientifiquement de la marche générale des choses qui intéressent au plus haut degré la civilisation ; ils admettent qu’il serait fort téméraire d’annoncer l’arrivée prochaine d’un événement politique, attendu que l’on cite de fort nombreuses erreurs, parfois énormes ou même cocasses, commises par d’illustres hommes d’État, qu’avait égarés la malencontreuse ambition de faire de telles prophéties ; mais ils croient fermement qu’une bonne connaissance des ensembles du passé permettrait à des sociologues d’obtenir des aperçus très vraisemblables d’ensembles futurs. Nos symboles possèdent une clarté plus grande que celle d’aucune autre des expressions susceptibles d’entrer dans une description schématique d’une masse de siècles ; c’est pourquoi les professionnels du scientisme historique s’emparent d’eux avec avidité, sans se demander quelle est la cause de cette bienfaisante clarté; tout critique ayant l’habitude de considérations pragmatiques, observera qu’il est absurde de vouloir profiter de la diremption pour obtenir de la clarté et d’oublier ce qu’est la diremption quand on se sert de ce qu’elle a produit.

I trust that readers who know more about Sorel than I do will advise me if I’ve missed his point.

The most intriguing occurrence flagged by ARTFL are two passages from Fourier. Unfortunately, they are spurious. The passages come from Simone Debout-Oleszkiewicz’s introduction to Fourier’s collected works (my guess is that the introduction dates from the 1960s), rather than Fourier’s text itself. It would seem that there might have been some legitimate nineteenth-century French uses of the term, if only because Friedrich von Hayek’s influential discussion of the concept traced the origins of the “scientistic hubris” to the founding of the École polytechnique at the close of the eighteenth century.¹ But since, as I noted last time, “scientism” is a term that (at least until recently) is typically used to describe something that other people do, the figures that Hayek saw as laying the foundations for “scientism” understood themselves as engaged in science. Hayek was, however, curious enough about earlier usages of the term to attempt a brief discussion of it (drawing, in part, on J. Fiolle’s 1936 Scientisme et Science — a book that, if WorldCat is right, is in the collections of only two North American libraries).

Fortunately, Peter Schöttler has recently provided a helpful survey of the history of this “difficult concept.”² He argues that the English use of the term was the result of an appropriation of French debates on the role of science in modern society, with a particular focus on theological matters, including controversies over the “historical Jesus” (250).³ Discussions of social organization by disciples of Saint-Simon provided an additional pathway for the term into English; the Ngram I discussed last time may have picked up a later echo of this in the article by Charles Cestre that helped to drive the sudden spike in usage around 1920.

A comparison of the various English, German, and French terms is not particularly informative, but it does suggest that English usage is consistently less common than the French and the German (though I suspect that I am probably missing an embarrassingly obvious explanation for this) and that the spike in English usage around 1920 — while exaggerated for reasons that I explained last time — was preceded by similar upticks in German and French (can we attribute this to the Great War?).

An Ngram of nineteenth-century appearances of the term is even less informative, but does confirm (if further confirmation was needed) that, whatever its origins, this peculiar pejorative would not enter into general usage until the next century (note that the alleged “English” uses of the term prior to 1850 are, as I noted last time, actually from Latin texts).

And with this, my crude attempts at tracing the history of this concept cease (for now, anyway).

How “Scientism” Works

The rules that would appear to govern the use of the term have changed very little since it first began to be used in the nineteenth century. To employ the term is to draw a boundary between a set of practices (“science”) that, when properly conducted, are worthy of praise and a set of practices that, because they have crossed this boundary, are viewed as problematic. The use of the term “scientism” implies that those who employ it:

possess, and are able to articulate, a conception of the essential features of “real science”
can provide an account of what it is about the set of practices that are criticized as “scientistic” that distinguishes them from the set of practices that constitutes legitimate “science”
can provide an account of the various harms that follow as a consequence of “scientism”

What is perhaps most immediately striking about most uses of the term is that the focus falls on item #3 and that the account of item #2 tends to be quite hasty and generally cast in the form of metaphors involving boundary violations. See for example, the example I offered last time from the 1889 compendium Christian Evidences: “Science itself is modest and intelligent, and amongst other points of knowledge knows its place and keeps it.” The same concern with boundaries and locations can be found at the start of Weiseltier’s rejoinder to Pinker:

The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question. Science confers no special authority, it confers no authority at all, for the attempt to answer a nonscientific question. It is not for science to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art. Those are philosophical matters, and science is not philosophy, even if philosophy has since its beginnings been receptive to science. Nor does science confer any license to extend its categories and its methods beyond its own realms, whose contours are of course a matter of debate.

The title of Wieseltier’s article — “Crimes Against the Humanities. Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don’t let it happen” — speaks of “crimes” in the plural, but the charge he files against scientism is always the same: trespassing.

The first item on my list tends to receive the least attention. While lamentable, this is hardly surprising. Since invocations of “scientism” tend to occur in response to a perceived threat, the argument always focuses on item #3: nineteenth-century clergy were disturbed by Darwin, Wieseltier is bothered by Michael Chwe’s application of game theoretic approaches to Jane Austin’s works, Jonah Lehrer’s drawing of analogies between Proust and neuroscience, Richard von Mises’ attempt to subject Rilke’s poetry to “logical analysis,” Jared Diamond’s account of the domestication of animals (specifically, his invocation of what he terms the Anna Karenina principle), and Roman Jakobson’s analysis of consonant placement in Baudelaire’s “Le Chat.” What would appear to lie behind these particular concerns is a more general anxiety about the precarious state of what Wieseltier understands as “the humanities.” Item #2 typically receives considerably less attention. Those concerned with the harm done by “scientism” are content to emphasize that they welcome and, indeed, even cherish the achievements of “true science” and are critical only of the illegitimate extension of the methods of science beyond its proper domain, which (as the critic of “scientism” sometimes stresses) is something no true scientist would ever do. The rhetorical advantages of this profession of respect for the work of “true scientists” should be obvious: (1) it allows the critic to focus on particular boundary violations (i.e., item #3) rather than raising broader issues about the place of science in society (e.g., Wieseltier tells us that this is a “philosophical question,” but avoids offering much in the way of an answer) and (2) it frees the critic from having to discuss item #1 (in part, because it is simply assumed that “real scientists” know their place and would never extend their methods beyond their proper domain — whatever that might be — and, in part, because those whose do focus on such questions — e.g., philosophers and historians of science — produce works that do not seem to have much appeal to literary humanists like Wieseltier).

While the critic of scientism may be making the best of a bad situation, this strategy has one obvious weakness: it leaves an opening for a scientist who is bent on going rogue to offer an account of item #1 that includes, as a central feature of science, a readiness to extend the boundaries of the sciences into new domains. This is more or less Pinker’s strategy in his response to Wieseltier’s initial article. At this point, the critic of scientism is faced with a limited set of moves:

The critic can dispute the scientist’s account of what scientists do by offering an elaboration of item #1 that explains why this particular extension of the methods of the sciences represents scientism rather than science.
The critic can argue that the scientist’s account of item #1 is itself an example of “scientism” since such an account already trespasses into domains that lie outside science (e.g., it is a matter that should be decided by the philosophers).

Wieseltier makes gestures in both of these directions, but my chief concern lies less with what he does than with what this may have to do with what I have been trying to do on this blog: explore disputes about enlightenment.

Humanists in Jeopardy

What interests me about these otherwise tired arguments about “scientism” is the way in which they echo certain features of disputes about the concept of “enlightenment.” Indeed, it’s tempting to see the opposition between “science” and “scientism” as a continuation of the contrast between “true” and “false” enlightenment. That opposition, as I’ve suggested in earlier posts and summarized in the paper I gave in Bilbao when I wasn’t hunting pintxos, began to fade by the close of the nineteenth century with the recognition, among those had been trying to defend a “true enlightenment” that remained grounded in religious truth, that “enlightenment” was now firmly in the grip of what would eventually come to be known as “the Enlightenment.” But it would appear that the struggle was prolonged by the emerging contrast between “science” and “scientism.” Purged of its overt theological content, this contrast would drag on into the next century, becoming increasingly heated around the time when two German exiles living in Los Angeles explored these and related matters in a book called Dialectic of Enlightenment. I hope, in a later post, to contrast their account with the discussions of scientism that were being offered, around this same time, by von Hayek and Voegelin.

The rules for these contests were nicely summarized by Albert O. Hirschman in his discussion of what he termed the “jeopardy thesis.” He explained the peculiar appeal of this form of “reactionary” rhetoric (which he distinguished from the “perversity” and “futility” theses) as follows:

The arguments of the perverse effect and of the futility thesis proceed along very different lines, but they have something in common: both are remarkably simple and bald — therein, of course, lies much of their appeal. In both cases it is shown how actions undertaken to achieve a certain purpose fail miserably to do so. Either no change at all occurs or the action yields an outcome that is the opposite of the one that was intended. … there is a third, more commonsensical and moderate way of arguing against a change which, because of the prevailing state of public opinion, one does not care to attack head-on …: it asserts that the proposed change, though perhaps desirable in itself, involves unacceptable costs or consequences of one sort or another.⁴

Among the appeals of the jeopardy thesis is that it allows the critic to accept past reforms while arguing that further steps in the same direction will only serve to undermine what has already been accomplished: to modify Wieseltier’s claim slightly, it is to argue that, while science has been a blessing, “scientism” (i.e., a science that does not stay within its proper boundaries) will be a curse.

But as Hirschman also stressed, his three forms of “reactionary” rhetoric have “progressive” equivalents. The progressive version of “jeopardy” thesis takes the form of the argument that — because “all good things go together” — the further pursuit of certain policies will secure, rather than jeopardize, past achievements (151). Viewed in this light, Pinker might be seen as answering Wieseltier’s reactionary jeopardy argument with its “progressive” variant. Central to Pinker’s proposed rehabilitation of the term “scientism” is a conviction that what has worked before is bound to work again: the achievements of the sciences in enlightening us about past problems provide a warrant for applying the same general approach in other disciplines.

So we wind up with a situation where Pinker has every incentive to transform “scientism” into a badge of honor, arguing that scientists are engaged in scientism and, hence, have no need to stop at the border that Wieseltier is so intent on policing. This allows him to go on to describe (admittedly, rather breathlessly and not entirely clearly) all the fruitful work that humanists can do once the scientists have finished colonizing those backward parts of the academy where the humanists reside. Unable to offer any compelling reasons for scientists to stay on the other side of the border that marks the point where science falls into scientism, Wieseltier is left with only bad moves. In hopes of securing an enclave where his sort of humanists can be left in peace to read their books and impart their thoughts on the Big Questions, he concocts a fantastic image of demure, self-effacing scientists who scrupulously observe a boundary between science and scientism that he is unwilling and, presumably, unable to clarify.

At best, we have an argument that will persuade no one but which does hold out the promise of yet more exchanges in the New Republic. At worst, the result is a sort of humanist version of Stand Your Ground laws: since no real scientist would ever think of straying into their territory, literary humanists are free to regard any interlopers as frauds or worse (where “worse” includes that dreadful creature called “postmodernism”). Among other things, this would suggest that, should Michael Chwe or Jonah Lehrer ever find themselves wandering near the gated community policed by the literary editor of the New Republic, they would be well-advised to watch their step.

F. A. v. Hayek, “The Counter-Revolution of Science,” Economica 8, no. 29 (February 1, 1941): 9–36. ↩
Peter Schöttler, “Szientismus: Zur Geschichte Eines Schwierigen Begriffs,” NTM Zeitschrift Für Geschichte Der Wissenschaften, Technik Und Medizin 20,:4 (2012): 245–269. ↩
English (and, as Schöttler notes) German usage was further complicated by the appearance of “Christian Science” and the related formulation “Christian Scientism” around this same time (which was yet another of the problems in my Ngram, but one which I didn’t bother to discuss last time).
↩
Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction : Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1991) 81 ↩

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, History of Concepts, scientism | 8 Comments

On the Genealogy of “Scientism” (Part I)

Posted on September 9, 2013 by James Schmidt

Last Monday I flew back from two weeks in Spain, where I interrupted my research on pintxos long enough to attend the Sixteenth International Conference on the History of Concepts. On Tuesday, I staggered into my first class, which — as chance would have it — was also the day when Jon Stewart ended his hiatus from The Daily Show. As chance would also have it, a few days later Leon Wieseltier published a response on the New Republic website to the rejoinder that Steven Pinker had written, about a month earlier, to the series of attacks on “scientism” that had been appearing in the New Republic. Among their number was the commencement address Wieseltier delivered at Brandeis University back in May.

Earlier in the summer, when I was laboring under the illusion that the fool’s paradise in which we academics reside during those months that Daniel Bell once named as the three most compelling reasons for becoming an academic would last forever and I could waste my time dealing with such matters, I posted a few unpleasant comments on Wieseltier’s commencement address, which struck me as (shall we say?) not without its shortcomings. I also read Pinker’s response, but since it was already August and the intimations of the morality of my summer hiatus were already knocking at my door, I figured I should let this all slide and spend my time thinking about Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. It helped that the New Republic website directed readers of Pinker’s article to a discussion of these matters by Philip Kitcher dating from March 4, 2012, “The Trouble with Scientism: Why History and the Humanities are Also a Form of Knowledge.” Kitcher’s article struck me as far more lucid, temperate, and sensible than Wieselteir’s Brandeis address, but I may have been biased in favor of Kitcher’s discussion because (a) it recognized that historians were also part of “the humanities” and (b) it began with a discussion of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (and I’m a sucker for discussions of the War Requiem).

That Pinker’s piece was almost immediately followed by (of all things) a video of Leon Wieseltier explaining why science “doesn’t have all the answers” was enough to suggest that this discussion was spiraling downward into the sort of Public Intellectual death matches that those of us who aspire to the role of peaceful members of the Freemasonry of Useless Erudition would be well-advised to avoid. I feared that the next step would be for Pinker and Wieseltier to pitch PBS a pilot in which they would host a sort of upmarket version of Crossfire with Pinker playing the role of Paul Begala — albeit a Paul Begala who had somehow gotten hold of Peter Frampton’s now-departed hair (for reasons that should be obvious, I think Mr. Frampton looks much better without it) — and Wieseltier as a Tucker Carlson with a better vocabulary and worse tailor. All of this would have been reason enough, were further reasons needed, for me to head for Spain and begin my pursuit of pintxos.

Now that Jon Stewart is back on the job we can hope that he will find his way to the offices of the New Republic, take these quarrelsome fellows aside, and tell them to stop hurting America. Until then, the rest of us can marvel at the fact that (as Patchen Markell has noted elsewhere), with the publication of Wieseltier’s “Crimes Against the Humanities: Now Science Wants to Invade the Liberal Arts” the New Republic has finally found an invasion that it can’t support.

But though I know I should simply write this odd little dustup off as something that happens when A-List Public Intellectuals find themselves with more time on their hands than they should, I find that I can’t. What keeps me coming back to it is the word “scientism” itself. It’s a term that I recall hearing tossed around back during my graduate school days and encountered more recently in certain of Karl Popper’s letters to Isaiah Berlin (though Popper tended to prefer “scientivism”), but which I assumed had long ago faded from usage. When I mentioned this to a younger colleague, she recalled that the term had some currency during her graduate school days. This suggests that getting worked up about scientism may be one of those things that a fair number of us did when we were in graduate school, but got over once we became well-functioning cogs in the machinery of the higher education branch of the culture industry. This might explain why I found the return of the word to be (as my colleagues in Comp Lit like to say) Unheimlich.

So, I thought I’d devote a couple of posts to exorcising this unwelcome ghost. This installment will focus on the provenance of the term. Next week I’ll take a look at how it works. And then, if all goes well, I will never think about this ugly, stupid word again.

A Note on Usage: Science, Scientists, and Scientism

We might begin by noting that the word itself has an inherent shortcoming: it is not clear how we go about designating those who engage in “scientism.” If an atheist is someone who embraces the doctrine of atheism and an onanist is someone who … well, never mind … then wouldn’t someone who champions the cause of scientism have to be a scientist? Of course not. For, as we shall see, critics of “scientism” regularly insist that “scientism” is not equivalent to “science” and science is what real scientists do. This would seem to suggest that, since science is done by scientists, scientism must be the activity in which “scientistists” are engaged. All it takes but one attempt to utter the word “scientistists” and the problem should be clear.

Since the next post will look at the way the term scientism works in more detail it will be enough, for now, to note that scientism would seem to be one of those terms that refer to doctrines that other people hold (it might be noted that “deism” would appear to have started out this way as well, though — since the word “deist” rolls of the tongue more easily than “scientistist” those who accused others of engaging in “deism” also had a convenient name for those who embraced the doctrine). The fact that those who are concerned about “scientism” have no name to designate those who engage in this practice seems to have provided Pinker with the opening that he tried to exploit in his rejoinder to Wieselthier: since Pinker, of course, is a “scientist” (and Wieseltier, of course, is not), he suggests that he and his fellow scientists should try to reclaim the much-abused term “scientism” as a description of their general standpoint.

But this, of course, is not the way in which “scientism” has tended to be used. Wieseltier may criticize scientism, but he insists that he has nothing but love for science. In his response to Pinker he stresses:

Science is a regular source of awe and betterment. No humanist in his right mind would believe otherwise. No humanist in his right mind would believe otherwise.

That’s right: so deep is Wieseltier’s love for science that he tells us, first in Roman, then in Italic, that humanists would be deranged not to view science as “a regular source of awe and betterment” (we can assume that Wieseltier also believes that no humanist in her right mind would believe otherwise and we can delay a consideration of the weasel word “regular” until next time).

Wieseltier made the same point back in May when he insisted:

Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic question.

There is little in this quotation is particularly novel: as we shall see, the appeal of the term “scientism” has long resided in its enabling those who deploy it to distinguish what they see as a set of practices (“science”) that pose no particular threat to that set of practices whose integrity they seek to defend (in Wieseltier’s case, “the humanities”) from another set of practices (“scientism”) that do. The difference between “science” and “scientism” is sometimes underlined by preceding “science” with adjectives such as “true” or “real.” For Wieseltier (but, as we shall see, not just for Wieseltier) the metaphors that characterize the difference tend to be framed in terms of a violation of boundaries: “science” knows its place, but “scientism” doesn’t.

How Long Has This “Scientism” Business Been Going On?

A quick, and admittedly dirty, sense of how long people have been tossing this term around can be gotten by constructing an Ngram and poking around a bit in the samples that Google allows us to read. Here’s an unsmoothed Ngram, which also serves as a cautionary lesson in trusting what the Ngram tells us about words like “scientism”:

Obviously, something rather odd seems to be happening around 1920. With the smoothing turned back on, this peculiar spike is suppressed and we have a more or less steady rise in the term across the next several decades. But we should resist that temptation: it is better to be clear that Ngrams are doing strange things than to pretend that they aren’t (and note that pointing out the limits of using the Ngram is a cheap and easy way of inoculating oneself against the charge of creeping “scientism”). The lesson to be drawn from this exercise is that “scientism” is a rather rare word and, as a result, subject to wild vacillations. Here (and in many other cases), it might be best to regard the Ngram as a sort of visual finding aid for the archive of volumes that Google scanned: it suggests which parts of the archive might be worth investigating, but to make any sense of what is happening, we will need to poke around in the examples and see what it is that is producing these erratic peaks.

Once we do, it becomes a bit clear what was going on. In 1919 the American theologian Charles Gray Shaw’s The Ground and Goal of Human Life was published by New York University Press.¹ The word “scientism” appears in it at least 100 times. Given the relative rarity of the word “scientism” this will be more than enough to make the Ngram resemble the price chart for a stock that a hedge fund’s computer program has decided to purchase, perhaps for reasons that are known only to the now-retired programmer. At around the same time, Charles Cestre used the word in a somewhat different sense in an article on the labor situation in the American Review of Reviews 61 (1920) p. 55:

The American Review of Reviews added a few more hits by subsequently republishing Cestre’s article in some sort of annual collection that they produce. Finally, there are a few other uses of the word around this time (which need not detain us). The result of this sudden convergence of texts invoking the term “scientism” is a wave so massive that, if you look closely at the Ngram, you will see George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg drowning in it.

Were further lessons needed as to why, despite its charms, one should be very suspicious about what the Ngram viewer is serving up can be learned by looking a snippet (Google does not let us see the entire text) from The Dublin Review (Vol. 204, p. 189) that, according to Google, dates from 1836:

… be tempted to call it scientism, if it were not for the fact that its first result is to destroy, together with the rationality of science, its very possibility.

This example would appear to have a surprising resemblance to current conventions of usage but, as it turns out, Google’s metadata is wrong: the proper date for the text is 1939, not 1836.² Indeed, as far as I have been able to determine, all of the usages of the term “scientism” prior to 1850 turn out to be in Latin.

There are, however, a few legitimate appearances of the word during the latter part of the nineteenth century. We find a bit of Enlightenment bashing in the editors’ introduction to an 1868 edition of Bishop Thomas Percy’s naughtier writings: “The middle of the 18th century was a time of mechanistic, factitious scientism that infected even poetry ….”³ It turns up again in the concluding paragraph of the translation of Karl Rosenkranz’s discussion for Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that appeared in an 1872 issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.⁴ The term also appears with some frequency in religious writings, particularly in the context of arguments against Darwin. Indeed, it seems to have been so popular in this context that Christian Evidences, a thematically-organized 1889 compendium of short extracts from various texts, devoted a section to “Scientism”, which included the following passage:

Scientism is pedantry. Science itself is modest and intelligent, and amongst other points of knowledge knows its place and keeps it.⁵

And with this, we have arrived at a usage that looks rather like Wieselthier’s.

One of the more extended treatments of the notion can be found in James John Garth Wilkinson — a “Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society” — who offered a discussion of the “Plagues of Scientism” in his The New Jerusalem and the Old Jerusalem: The Place and Service of the Jewish Church among the Aeons of Revelation, with Other Essays(London: James Speirs 1894) p. 291.⁶ It begins this way:

THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM.

The countries described in the Word are as we have seen in the internal sense spiritual countries, distinct regions or faculties of the human mind, which itself in the spiritual world is the only map that is known. Regarded in this light it is simply on the one hand an ouranography of goodness and truth, and on the other a genennagraphy of evil and falsity.

The text goes on like this for several more pages before Wilkinson finally clarifies what he means by “scientism”:

It may further be said that modern scientism, — I use the term to distinguish it from true science, — also has its abundant rituals, but which belong to the egotistical intellect, and to no church. (294)

It would seem, then, that by the close of the nineteenth century, the paradigm for contrasting “science” and “scientism” was more or less set. Ever since then, those who positioned themselves as critics of “scientism” have been able to stress that they have no objection to what they take to be “true science” but are concerned only to resist those false forms of science that do not know their proper place.

In the next (and, I hope, the final) installment on these matters, we will take a closer look at how the particular rhetorical advantages that those who employ the term “scientism” derive from its use. I trust that by then my longing for pintxos may finally have faded.

I spent an afternoon earlier this summer skimming Shaw’s book and reading a few of his articles. He seems to have been a well-respected and quite competent theologian, who published widely in the major theological journals. But I have no competence in the history of twentieth-century American theology and have no way of evaluating the significance of his work. ↩
Fortunately, this error was flagged by a helpful user. ↩
J. W. Hales and F. J. Furnivall, eds. Thomas Percy, Loose and Humorous Songs (London, 1868) v.
↩
Karl Rosenkranz, “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 6:1 (1872), pp. 53-82 ↩
Henry Donald Maurice Spence-Jones, Charles Neil, and Joseph Samuel Exell, Christian Evidences. The Holy Spirit. The Beatitudes. The Lord’s Prayer. Man, and His Traits of Character (Funk & Wagnalls, 1889) 197 ↩
Wilkinson employed the term in other works as well, though listing them all here would be too pedantic even for me. As Clint Eastwood once advised, “A man must know his limits” (advice which, as his encounter with that empty chair demonstrated, he found himself unable to follow). ↩

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged History of Concepts, rants, scientism | 8 Comments

Reviews Revisited: Klaus Epstein on Fritz Valjavec

Posted on August 28, 2013 by James Schmidt

One of the great benefits of journal archives such as JSTOR and Project Muse is that it is possible, while searching for a particular article, to stumble across something that you didn’t know existed. In a way, it’s a bit like going into the library to find a book and coming away with a few better ones.

A few years ago, I was trying to tracking down a reference to an article by Klaus Epstein and, in the process, came across his 1963 review of Fritz Valjavec’s Geschichte der abendländischen Aufklärung.¹ For those unfamiliar with Epstein’s work, he is best known as the author of The Genesis of German Conservatism (1966), a wide-ranging study of German thought between 1770 and 1806 that remains an essential guide to the late Enlightenment. His career was cut short when he was killed, at the age of 40, in an auto accident. While he had been a quite productive scholar, his early death made everything he wrote all the more precious, so I eagerly read the review. If there’s ever a hall of fame for scholarly reviews, it should be among the first ones to be inducted.

Valjavec had been the director of the Munich Institute for the Study of South Eastern Europe and his posthumously published overview of the Enlightenment would become one of those texts that, I suspect, is cited much more frequently than it is actually read. Epstein opened his review with a sentence that lets the reader know that, before things are finished, there is going to be quite a bit of blood on the floor.

The History of the Enlightenment is a work which shows amazing – though evidently somewhat erratic and arbitrary – erudition in most European languages; its chief fault is that it frequently degenerates into a catalogue-like accumulation of miscellaneous information without much – and least of all new – interpretation.

A page of careful summary follows (aspiring reviewers should watch and learn: be sure to cover the territory before you strike the final blow) and then, in the final paragraph, the verdict — which begins in a deceptively tentative mode, but gathers force as it proceeds – is delivered:

The basic flaw of the volume, if it is a flaw, is the lack of a distinctive point of view, whether intellectually or morally. Valjavec had an eclectic mind which was better at absorbing different opinions than choosing between them; the best way to avoid choice is merely to accumulate materials in the name of objective scholarship. The reader never knows where the author really stands; this particular reviewer would have liked to see a more explicit appreciation of the great enlightenment legacy of humanitarianism, reformism, reasonableness, cosmopolitanism, and pacifism. But any point of view is better than none; authors and readers should choose between a defense of the age, like Peter Gay’s Voltaire: The Poet as Realist, or an attack upon it, like Carl Becker’s Heavenly City, or an explicit and differentiated middle position. They should avoid mere blandness, however disguised as encyclopedic erudition, when dealing with a movement that is far from merely historic but strikes at the basic cords of the “human condition” even today.

The reader (well, this reader anyway) might pause to wonder whether it is really obligatory for studies of the Enlightenment to praise or blame it. What is it about the Enlightenment that compels us to treat it as if we are still its contemporaries and leads us to think that we need to take sides? Isn’t this the essence of what Foucault once described as “the blackmail of the Enlightenment”? But, as it turns out, this isn’t really Epstein’s point. He grants the possibility of “an explicit and differentiated middle position” (which, I suppose, means something like “this part is good, but that part is not”) and, in any case, what needs to be avoided would seem (at first glance) to amount to nothing more than the sort of overwhelming, deadening blandness that he finds in Valjavec.

But — and this is where the peculiar genius of the review lies — it turns out there are more serious problems than Valjavec’s blandness. The second sentence in the passage quoted above has far-reaching implications. Valvajec’s mind was “better at absorbing different opinions than choosing between them” and it is this inability to choose that goes a long way towards explaining why the “flaw” that Epstein notes at the outset is, indeed, a flaw. For it turns out to be a moral flaw, rather than an intellectual one. The brief opening paragraph of the review closed with a sentence that – seemingly tossed out as an aside – lingers uneasily over the rest of the review. Epstein notes that Valjavec’s work had been published posthumously and goes on to observe that the “accompanying biographical panegyric” by the book’s editor “is interesting in summarizing Vljavec’s scholarly achievements while leaving his political affiliation from 1933 to 1945 unmentioned.”

That’s it. Nothing more. But it turns out to be enough.

Epstein’s contemporaries may have been wondered what the failure of Valjavec’s book on the Enlightenment to take a stand, either morally or intellectually, vis à vis its subject matter might have to do with the stand that Valjavec might have taken in the years between 1933 and 1945. Forty years later, the German historians Gerhard Seewan, Michael Fahlbusch, and Norbert Spannenburger filled in the missing biographical details.² Valjavec took up his post at the Munich Institute in 1935 and, in the years that followed, worked hard to transform it into a center for “combative scholarship” that provided ideological support for National Socialist ethnic policies. Crossing the (admittedly murky) line that separates rank opportunism from outright complicity, he was sent to Russia in the summer of 1941, where he lent linguistic and clerical support to the Einsatzgruppe operating in the area.

Hence the force of the charge that Epstein was leveling. It is not just that Valjavec was unable to take a stand, for or against, the Enlightenment. Epstein’s problem with Geschichte der abendländischen Aufklärung is that the book was the result of that same plodding thoroughness that, twenty years before, its author had used to assemble materials on the various ethnic groups who had the misfortune to dwell in lands occupied by the Third Reich. Readers of Geschichte der abendländischen Aufklärung, Epstein seems to be suggesting, might want to keep this in mind. Good books can, of course, be written by bad authors. But one of the questions that has continued to haunt me after reading Epstein’s review is whether there might be certain works that, whatever their merits, were the work of authors whose failings should never be forgotten.

Klaus Epstein, “Review: The Enlightenment,” The Review of Politics 25, no. 3 (July 1963): 401–403. ↩
See their essays in Mathias Beer and Gerhard Seewann, eds., Südostforschung Im Schatten Des Dritten Reiches: Institutionen, Inhalte, Personen (1920-1960), Südosteuropäische Arbeiten ;; 119; (München: R. Oldenbourg, 2004). ↩

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