April 2024
Milesian currents
2 April 2024, around 15.49.
οἱ ἀπὸ Θάλεω καὶ Πυθαγόρου, λέγω δὲ τοὺς μἐχρι τῶν Στωικῶν καταβεβηκότας σὺν Ἡρακλεἰτῳ, τρεπτὴν καὶ ἀλλοιωτὴν καὶ μεταβλητὴν καὶ ῥευστὴν ὅλην δι᾽ ὅλης τὴν ὕλην.
The successors of Thales and Pythagoras, I mean those (sc. philosophers) descending as far as the Stoics together with Heraclitus, say that matter is wholly and completely changeable and alterable and mutable and fluid.1
- Following the old Teubner – οἱ ἀπὸ Θάλεω καὶ Πυθαγόρου καὶ οἱ Στωικοὶ τρεπτὴν καὶ ἀλλοιωτὴν καὶ μεταβλητὴν καὶ ῥευστὴν ὅλην δι᾽ ὅλης τὴν ὕλην – W.W. Goodwin has this as: ‘The disciples of Thales and Pythagoras, with the Stoics, are of opinion that matter is changeable, mutable, convertible, and sliding through all things.’ Take your pick. It’s all one. [↩]
right round
14 April 2024, around 10.23.
Anyone who refuses to grasp the fact that this book contains many traps and multiple, deliberately intended meanings, or who has not managed to find somebody possessing the requisite qualifications and skills not to get hopelessly lost in its pages, should immediately give up all ambition of publishing it in a foreign language, thereby leaving the way clear for other, more competent publishers to carry out the task in the future.
* * *
And indeed his style is appalling: twisted, dark, allusive, filled with digressions, untraceable references, private jokes, puns within puns and invented words, cryptograms, secret names for persons in the past or present, for ideas, for the inexpressible contents of visions of the truth; where the spirit cannot be conveyed by the verbal flesh he attempts at once to imitate and emulate the cabbalistic utterances, justly forgotten, of mystagogues of the past, in phrases where it is impossible to tell where imitation ceases and parody begins.
- This is perhaps one of the best advertisements for Hamann I have encountered. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? [↩]
Crambe repetita (52)
15 April 2024, around 16.30.
Γίνονται δ’ αἱ μὲν καλούμεναι ψυχαὶ ἐκ τῶν καμπῶν, αἳ γίνονται ἐπὶ τῶν φύλλων τῶν χλωρῶν, καὶ μάλιστα ἐπὶ τῆς ῥαφάνου, ἣν καλοῦσί τινες κράμβην, πρῶτον μὲν ἔλαττον κέγχρου, εἶτα μικροὶ σκώληκες αὐξανόμενοι, ἔπειτα ἐν τρισὶν ἡμέραις κάμπαι μικραί· μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα αὐξηθεῖσαι ἀκινητίζουσι, καὶ μεταβάλλουσι τὴν μορφήν, καὶ καλοῦνται χρυσαλλίδες, καὶ σκληρὸν ἔχουσι τὸ κέλυφος, ἁπτομένου δὲ κινοῦνται. Προσέχονται δὲ πόροις ἀραχνιώδεσιν οὔτε στόμα ἔχουσαι οὔτ’ ἄλλο τῶν μορίων διάδηλον οὐθέν. Χρόνου δ’ οὔ πολλοῦ διελθόντος περιρρήγνυται τὸ κέλυφος, καὶ ἐκπέτεται ἐξ αὐτῶν πτερωτὰ ζῷα, ἃς καλοῦμεν ψυχάς.
The so-called psyche or moth is generated from caterpillars which grow on green leaves, chiefly leaves of the raphanus, which some call cabbage. At first it is less than a grain of millet; it then grows into a small grub; and in three days it is a tiny caterpillar. After this it grows on and on, and becomes quiescent and changes its shape, and is now called a chrysalis. The outer shell is hard, and the chrysalis moves if you touch it. It attaches itself by cobweb-like filaments, and is unfurnished with mouth or any other apparent organ. After a little while the outer covering bursts asunder, and out flies the winged creature that we call the psyche.
a vexed question
18 April 2024, around 8.39.
That Hamann, the son of a barber-surgeon, does not ask the (im)patient reader: what ails thee?1
- But that begs the question of whom the text serves, which need not worry us here. [↩]
the lot of the faint heart
22 April 2024, around 15.34.
“Ich glaube, daß er kein Automat ist” hat, so ohne weiteres, noch gar keinen Sinn.
“I believe that he is not an automaton”, just like that, so far makes no sense.
ἐλεγέ τε θαυμάζειν τῶν τὰς λιθίνας εἰκόνας κατασκευαζομένων τοῦ μὲν λίθου προνοεῖν ὅπως ὁμοιότατος ἔσται, αὑτῶν δ᾽ ἀμελεῖν, ὡς μὴ ὁμοίους τῷ λίθῳ φαίνεσθαι.
He used to express his astonishment that the sculptors of marble statues should take pains to make the block of marble into a perfect likeness of a man, and should take no pains about themselves lest they should turn out mere blocks, not men.
In an effort to be less of a blockhead, I’m still chipping away at trying to make sense out of Hamann. It’s an odd experience, because there’s usually a lot going on and it’s not always clear what’s intentional, incidental, or accidental – or if it matters. Take the following passage from the introduction (please):
Sollte unsere Historie Mythologie werden; so wird diese Umarmung eines leblosen Lehrers, der ohne Eigennutz Wunder der Erfüllung gethan, in ein Mährchen verwandelt seyn, das den Reliquien von Pygmalions Leben ähnlich sehen wird. Ein Schöpfer seines Volkes in der Sprache unsers Witzes wird nach einer undenklichen Zeit eben so poetisch verstanden werden müssen, als ein Bildhauer seines Weibes.
Should our history become mythology, this embrace of a lifeless teacher, who without self-interest worked fulfilling miracles, will be changed into a fairy-tale that would appear similar to the relics of Pygmalion’s life. A creator of his people, in the language of our wit(ticism)s, will after time immemorial have to be understood as poetically as a sculptor of his wife.
These two sentences occur at the end of a paragraph discussing the history of philosophy and statues of statesmen. Hamann draws a parallel between the two – namely, both belong to the past, are created by craftsmen at the behest of someone (a monarch) who pays for them, and both tend to elicit unintended and probably misguided responses. Immediately before this passage, Hamann mentions the ‘Scythian’, by which he means to indicate, according his footnote, Peter the Great,2 whom Hamann compares to (a) Christ as carpenter (learn by doing!) and (b) Herod ogling Salome (offer inappropriate rewards to even less appropriate people!).3
I do not, however, have any particular interest in that (or in the disinterested wonder-worker, for that matter). I am interested in the comparison to Pygmalion. It’s an odd image, particularly as the embrace4 of a lifeless statue does not necessary betoken affection,5 as a glance at Polybius and the case of Nabis, tyrant of Sparta (another statesman pursuing fiscal responsibility), and the somewhat ‘prickly’ image of his wife would confirm.6 I think the focus is not on Pygmalion per se, because Hamann does not seem interested in the realism of the statue; nor does he seem to care much for artistic skill – otherwise the story of the wandering statues created by Daedalus, from Plato’s Meno (97e–98a; with their built-in reference to errant knowledge), would be more appropriate.7
Go back, then, to the story of Pygmalion. An artist spurns marriage (spurns Venus), makes the image of a beautiful woman out of ivory, caresses it, dresses it, and on the feast day of the goddess spurned, prays modestly for a wife like his statue (though not, you will note, for his statue as a wife). Venus, with that indifference to human sensibility that tends to mark godly behavior, grants the wish he does not dare to ask anywhere but in his secret heart (if heart it be that asked).8 It is a very divine sort of economy, far beyond a physiocrat’s grasp. Interestingly, according to Apollodorus (3.14.3), this union (not, as Ovid suggests, the unfortunate familial encounter of Myrrha) ultimately led to Adonis, one of many the many minor mythological figures whose rites were coopted in early Christianity.
This appears, then, to be an echo of the biblical creation of man (from dust/stone) and woman (from bone), in addition to the direct reference to a myth that distinguishes divine power from human creativity – as human ingenuity tends to remain unfortunately creaturely. It also provides an inverted image of Lot’s wife, whom fear and lack of faith petrified. For Hamann, then, there is a living art (of faith) and then the lifeless salt of wit, and the two should be distinguished. The logic of this maneuver is not, to my mind, wholly palpable, but I am left shaking my head and saying with Meno: νὴ τὸν Δία, ὦ Σώκρατες, ἔοικεν τοιούτῳ τινί / Begad, Socrates, it seems to be very much as you say (mostly because I am left wondering what he will say next).
- The current English translations of Hamann are … not quite adequate; O’Flaherty is not so much a Nabokovian pony as a very small donkey dragging its footnotes, while Griffith-Dickson gets closer to the sense but provides less of a feeling for the allusions and wordplay – neither is sufficiently humorous. The translation here is based on Griffith-Dickson, with substantial rephrasings and modifications, including the addition of italics to match the emphasis from the first edition of the German. Merely as an example, Griffith-Dickson translates verwandelt (unobjectionably) as ‘evolve’ (O’Flaherty uses ‘transform’); my initial impulse was ‘metamorphose’ (because Ovid and Kafka), but that seemed too Latinate. I thought about ‘change’ and that set up a resonance with the phrase ‘we will all be changed’, so I checked how 1 Cor 15:51 was translated in Luther’s bible: ‘Siehe, ich sage euch ein Geheimnis: Wir werden nicht alle entschlafen, wir werden aber alle verwandelt werden’ (emphasis added). Bingo. [↩]
- It could also be doubled allusion to Anacharsis and his position relative to Socrates. In any case, it is strongly tinged with concern about seeking validation from foreign experts and the process not going as one had hoped. [↩]
- The Tsar’s fondness for foreign experts and penchant for taxation were perhaps of interest to one intended reader of the Memorabilia, the potentially patronizing merchant Johann Christoph Berens, who was based out of Riga, then part of the Russian Empire (thanks to the siege by the mentioned Peter), and it may also be an oblique reference to the failure of Hamann’s mysterious (catastrophic?) London mission, which ultimately led to his conversion. It’s probably also an allusion to the man of God in Habakkuk, but there are only so many wandering references one can chase down to make a few idle comments on two sentences. [↩]
- I also remember reading in Galen? In Hippocrates? about the athletic practice of hugging a pillar of cold stone on a winter’s day to increase one’s hardiness; the author, whoever it was, was slightly contemptuous of the practice, which does seem rather absurd. So absurd, indeed, that I’m not going to bother looking it up. [↩]
- The modern reader would perhaps also think of the statue of Commendatore from Don Giovanni. [↩]
- Was there a slantwise allusion to Polybius? Impossible to say. Probably not. There is not, to my knowledge, any evidence that Hamann had read the historian recently (if at all), although it is the sort of juicy story that’s usually memorable. It’s a fine intuitive strike if not intentional. [↩]
- Many thanks to PF for the reminder. [↩]
- And the poor statue wakes up a human female in bed with a strange man leering over her. There are many ways to interpret god’s gifts. [↩]
Adversaria (13)
30 April 2024, around 7.15.
‘Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth.’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 92)
‘Works of fiction should be seen as responses to obsessions, instincts, and tensions – responses whose purpose is simply to satisfy the mind’ —Danielle Régnier-Bohler (‘Imagining the Self’ in A History of Private Life (vol. 2), trans. Arther Goldhammer, p. 315)
‘A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage?’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 111)
‘Value is their social relation, their economic quality. A Book which possesses a certain value and a loaf of bread possessing the same value are exchanged for one another, are the same value but in a different material. As a value, a commodity is an equivalent for all other commodities in a given relationship. As value, the commodity is equivalent; as an equivalent, all its natural properties are extinguished’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 141)
‘Their apologetic wisdom consists in forgetting their own definitions at every decisive moment’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 150)
‘Nature does not produce money, any more than it produces a rate of exchange or a banker’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 239)