Papers by antonie dubbelman
Whatever one thinks of philosophical hermeneutics, there is enough truth in it to remind us that ... more Whatever one thinks of philosophical hermeneutics, there is enough truth in it to remind us that questions always arise within a horizon of our concerns. The question of what it was to be a philosopher in another century is inevitably marked by what it is to be a philosopher now.
Who was Goethe and why should anyone in the field of medical or developmental genetics care about... more Who was Goethe and why should anyone in the field of medical or developmental genetics care about him 170 years after his death? After all, easily accessible references such as the Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography and Medawar and Medawar [1983] do not cite him and many recent histories of science and biology either do not Dedicated to: Professor Stanley V. Longman, Chair Department of Drama, University of Georgia, Athens, with profound gratitude and abiding affection for over 50 years of friendship and shared enthusiasm for Italy, the arts, sciences, and humanities. A faithful friend is the medicine of life (Ecclesiasticus 6:16).
Scholem deplored was really a petrification by certainty, or a series of such petrifications. Ben... more Scholem deplored was really a petrification by certainty, or a series of such petrifications. Benjamin's work was scarred by a high ideological nastiness, as when he mocked "the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom" (as if Europe in his day was suffering from a surfeit of this), and speculated acidly about the belief in "the sacredness of life" (or from a surfeit of this), and responded with perfect diffidence to the censorship and the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union, which he coldly described as "the transfer of the mental means of production into public ownership." The pioneering explorer of memory worshipped history too luuch. He also wrote too much: he advised writers to "never stop writing because you have run out of ideas," and often he acted on his own advice. I confess that there are many pages in Benjamin that I do not understand, in which the discourse seems to be dictating itself, and no direction is clear. Like many esotericists, he abuses the privilege of obscurity. And yet Benjamin's writings are uncommonly rich with penetrating and prescient notions: the impoverishment of experience in modernlifej the primacy of memory as a mode of consciousness; the aura of the work of art, and its eclipse in the age of mechanical (not to speak of electronic) reproduction; the hope for "profane illumination"; the eternal entanglement of barbarism with civilization; the critical utility of the messianic idea-all these notions are justly celebrated, as are his luminous examinations of Goethe and Baudelaire and Kafka and Kraus. Benjamin's work is evidence of the light that a religious sensibility may shine upon secular existence. There are certainly very few critics who can match his power of suggestiveness: his ideas and intuitions have a way of lingering productively, even when you quarrel with them. In the application of philosophical concepts to cultural and social actualities, his decidedly unmystical friend Adorno was his only peer. Philosophical thinking retained its old role, for Benjamin: it was his best defense against despair. There still is no better one. x Critique [he wrote] is concerned with the truth content of a work of art, the commentary with its subject matter. The relationship between the two is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the work~s truth content is the more relevant the more inconspicuously and intimately it is bound up with its subject matter. If therefore precisely those works turn out to endure whose truth is Illumi114tiOns very real power of the George school, an influential group in which, as with all such entities, only ideological allegiance counted, since only ideology, not rank and quality, can hold a group together. Despite their pose of being above politics, George's disciples were fully as conversant with the basic principles of literary maneuvers as the professors were with the fundamentals of academic politics or the hacks and i ournalists with the ABC of "one good tum deserves another." Benjamin, however, did not know the score. He never knew how to handle such things, was never able to move among such people, not even when "the adversities of outer life which sometimes corne from all~sides, like wolves" (Briefe I, 198), had already afforded him' some insight into the ways of the world. Whenever he tried to adjust and be co-operative so as to get some firm ground under his feet somehow t things were sure to go wrong. A major study on Goethe from the viewpoint of Marxismin the middle twenties he came very close to joining the Communist Party-never appeared in print, either in the Great Russian Encyclopedia, for which it was intended, or in present-day Germany. Klaus Mann, who had commissioned a review of Brecht's Threepenny Novel for his periodical Die Sammlung, returned the manuscript because Benjamin had asked 250 French francs-then about 10 dollars-for it and he wanted to pay only 150. His commentary on Brecht's poetry did not appear in his lifetime. And the most serious difficulties finally developed with the Institute for Social Research, which, originally (and now again) part of the University of Frankfurt, had emigrated to America and on which Benjamin depended financially. Its guiding spirits, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were "dialectical materialists" and in their opinion Benjamin's thinking was "undialectic," moved in "materialistic categories, which by no means coincide with Marxist ones," was "lacking in mediation" insofar as, in an essay on Baudelaire, he had related "certain conspicuous elements within the superstructure ... directly, per~ haps even causally, to corresponding elements in the substructure." The result was that Benjamin's original essay, "The Paris Illuminations furnish the key to many a "riddle" -to write a prose of such singularly enchanting and enchanted closeness to reality. Wherever one looks in Benjamin's life, one will find the little hunchback. Long before the outbreak of the Third Reich he was playing his evil tricks, causing publishers who had promised Benjamin an annual stipend for reading manuscripts or editing a periodical for them to go bankrupt before the first number appeared. Later the hunchback did allow a collection of magnificent German letters, made with infinite care and provided with the most marvelous commentaries, to be printed-under the title Deutsche Menschen and with the motto" Von Ehre ohlle Ruhm/ Von Grosse ohne Glanz/Von Wurde obne Sold" (Of Honor without Fame/Of Greatness without Splendor/Of Dignity without Pay); but then he saw to it that it ended in the cellar of the bankrupt Swiss publisher, instead of being distributed, as intended by Benjamin, who signed the selection with a pseudonym, in Nazi Germany. And in this cellar the edition was discovered in 1961, at the very moment when a new edition had come off the press in Germany. (One would also charge it to the little hunchback that often the few things that were to take a good tum first presented themselves in an unpleasant guise. A case in point is the translation of Anabase by Alexis Saint-Leger Leger [St.-John Perse) which Benjamin, who thought the work "of little importance" [Briefe I, 381], undertook because, like the Proust translation, the assignment had been procured for him by Hofmannsthal. The translation did not appear in Germany': until after the war, yet Benjamin owed to it his contact with Leger, who, being a diplomat, was able to intervene and persuade the French government to spare Benjamin a second internment in France during the war-a privilege that very few other refugees enjoyed.) And then after mischief came "the piles of debris," the last of which, prior to the catastrophe at the Spanish border, was the threat he had felt, since 1938, that the Institute for Social Research in New York, the only "material and moral support" of his Paris existence (Briefe II, 839), would desert him. "The • Weltgericht (Last Judgment) plays on the dual mea.ning of Gericht (judgment; dish). (Translator's note.) . . . . Nebulous Pleasure horizonward will ilee, Just like a sylph behind the wings.
Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s-andcondit i... more Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s-andcondit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden.
In this paper I provide a brief summary of the German Bildung tradition, in an effort to lay grou... more In this paper I provide a brief summary of the German Bildung tradition, in an effort to lay groundwork for our discussion of Bildung in Dewey's mature philosophy. I will begin with some history of the term Bildung and then focus on Hegel's unique usage of the term. The German term Bildung dates to 16th century Pietistic theology, according to which, the devout Christian should seek to cultivate (Bildung) his talents and dispositions according to the image of God, which was innate in his soul. In addition to this theological usage, Paracelsus (1493-1591), Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), and Leibniz (1646-1716) also used the term in natural philosophy to refer to "the development or unfolding of certain potentialities within an organism."[1] In the 18th century, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the founding father of the Jewish Enlightenment, used the term in the sense of unfolding one's potential in an influential essay in 1784, "What is Enlightenment?," identifying Bildung with Enlightenment itself. Pedagogical theorists, like Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746-1818), also focused on how pedagogical reform could promote the development (Ausbildung) and education (Bildung) of the citizenry. By the end of the 18th century, Bildung was becoming a term with not only spiritual, but also philosophical and political connotations. Increasingly, Bildung was associated with liberation of the mind from tradition and superstition, but also liberation of the German people from a pre-modern political system of small feudal states that owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire. This political usage is apparent in the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), in which he went beyond the sense of individual formation or development to the development of a people (Volk). For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people. Although Herder is rightfully associated with late-eighteenth-century German nationalism, he conceived the German Volk as including both royalty and peasants, envisioning a classless society. Accordingly, Herder's cultural nationalism required that social unity be promoted from the bottom up, in contrast to the top down political nationalism to which many historians have attributed the rise of German militarism that ultimately culminated in the Third Reich. Because of the quality of his ideas and pervasiveness of his influence, it would be difficult to overemphasize Herder's importance in Western intellectual history. It has been said that Goethe (1749-1832) was transformed from a clever but conventional poet into the great artist we remember today by his encounter with Herder in 1770, and his continuing friendship with the philosopher. Herder The German Bildung Tradition
In Book 3 of his Politics, and again in Book 7, Aristotle makes explicit his disdain for the bana... more In Book 3 of his Politics, and again in Book 7, Aristotle makes explicit his disdain for the banausos (often translated 'mechanic') as an occupation qualified for full civic life. Where modern admirers of Aristotle, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, have taken him at face value concerning this topic and thus felt a need to distance themselves from him, I claim that the grounds that Aristotle offers for the exclusion of banausoi from citizenship are not consistent with other important teachings (found in the eighth book of the Politics as well as in several of his other writings) about the nature of poesis ('productive science', which is the form of knowledge characteristic of the so-called 'mechanical arts'). I further support this claim with reference to the role played by the mechanical arts within the Aristotelian framework of knowledge that one encounters in medieval European thought between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, with particular reference to Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, and Marsiglio of Padua. * I wish to thank Eugene Garver and Kelvin Knight for their very helpful comments on this paper and useful suggestions for its improvement.
In Book 3 of his Politics, and again in Book 7, Aristotle makes explicit his disdain for the bana... more In Book 3 of his Politics, and again in Book 7, Aristotle makes explicit his disdain for the banausos (often translated 'mechanic') as an occupation qualified for full civic life. Where modern admirers of Aristotle, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, have taken him at face value concerning this topic and thus felt a need to distance themselves from him, I claim that the grounds that Aristotle offers for the exclusion of banausoi from citizenship are not consistent with other important teachings (found in the eighth book of the Politics as well as in several of his other writings) about the nature of poesis ('productive science', which is the form of knowledge characteristic of the so-called 'mechanical arts'). I further support this claim with reference to the role played by the mechanical arts within the Aristotelian framework of knowledge that one encounters in medieval European thought between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, with particular reference to Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, and Marsiglio of Padua. * I wish to thank Eugene Garver and Kelvin Knight for their very helpful comments on this paper and useful suggestions for its improvement.
To be an art historian in Germany or Austria, the sites where the study of the discipline was bot... more To be an art historian in Germany or Austria, the sites where the study of the discipline was both founded and developed, was to be a member of an intellectual elite. The study of art in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century was based as much on private art collections, and the ability to gain access to these homes, as upon the study of art in museums. Born into the family of wealthy business people, Erwin Panofsky, who was taken to museums as a child, moved among these privileged intellectuals in those brilliant years of the Weimar Republic before its tragic end. Like many German intellectuals, Panofsky moved his career to America, taking with him the scholarly method of studying art in terms of meaning to Princeton University, where he spent the rest of his life. All too often the American understanding of this art historian is somewhat stripped down and remembered as a process of interpretation: icon, iconography and iconology, meaning that the icon or image was the symbol for a certain concept, such as the Cross was symbolic of the Crucifixion. All too often Americans tended to neglect the basis of Panofsky's thought: iconology or the placement of art in culture. But for Panofsky, art history was an extension of the philosophical thought of Germany in the early twentieth century.
Uploads
Papers by antonie dubbelman