[lit-ideas] Re: Curtiusiana
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- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2016 06:31:00 -0400
We are considering Curtius's essay on "European literature" (before the
European Union!) (Europäische Literatur) "und lateinisches Mitttelalter" --
and Latin Middle Ages --. Tr. into English by Willard R. Trask as "European
literature and the Latin Middle Ages".
McEvoy makes two comments. One directed to Speranza (me, that is) and the
use by Helm's quotation of Curtius's use of 'induction' -- invoking Popper
(Speranza invoking Popper that is).
The other is directed to Helm, about Henry VII:
In a message dated 3/18/2016 4:22:18 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes ad 1: "Why introduce hyperbole [or HYPERBOLE]?
I
doubt Popper would at all hate the historian for the talk of "induction": this
could here be treated as a harmless affectation; and insofar as a mistaken
theory of knowledge underpins its use, that is mostly the fault of
philosophers - or is someone going to say, historically, the idea of
"induction"
became embedded via historians? What Popper would point out is the
uncritical use of the term "laws" - and he might point someone to his book
"The
Poverty of Historicism" where he explains how there are no "laws" in history
like the "laws" sought in the natural sciences. Anyone who sees some validity
in "historicism" should read that book. This does not mean a 'scientific
approach' cannot be taken to history even if the formulations of history do
not often lend themselves to decisive falsification."
Good. Yes, I wonder why Curtius, a literary critic, as it were, would spend
time on the idea of induction held by the historians of his day.
Apparently his opus magnum, this "Europäische Literatur und lateinisches
Mitttelalter" was a compilation of all that Curtius KNEW so he naturally
dropped in
what he may have written in what I think he called 'excursus'. But it may do
to explore the idea of law. It seems that Curtius is into a --
-- law that applies to "European" literature.
and a
-- law that applies to the Latin Middle Ages.
So, he later wants to propose a further law that we may call
-- Curtius's Law of Continuity.
If Strawson is right about 'not' (""I'm not having an affair" -- says
Bradley Cooper -- implicating: "Some Journalist thought I did"), Curtius's Law
of Continuity has to be seen in terms of this or that literary critic that
there is a BIG BREAK between, say, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Sack of
Rome, and the beginning of "Tuscan literature" as we know it. But anyone
who read La Storia della letteratura italiana by Francesco de Sanctis would
disagree.
---- EXCURSUS -- on "Italian" (rather than "European" literature as a
whole):
The contents of de Sanctis's twenty chapters are as follows:
I -- Sicilian literature
II - Tuscan literature.
III (Lirica di Dante Alighieri)
IV - Poetry of the Duecento.
V -- ("Mysteries and visions") - Primitive chivalry literature and Holy
Bible.
VI - 14th century.
VII (La Divina Commedia) - Treatment of Dante's influence.
VIII - Petrarch's "Canzoniere"
IX - Boccaccio's Decameron.
X (Il trecentista) -- Franco Sacchetti.
XI (Le stanze) - Quattrocento: Leon Battista Alberti, Poliziano, Lorenzo
il Magnifico, Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo ("Orlando innamorato"),
Giovanni Pontano.
XII - Seicento.
XIII - Ariosto's L'Orlando furioso
XIV - Teofilo Folengo
XV - Machiavelli and Guicciardini
XVI - Pietro Aretino
XVII - Torquato Tasso
XVIII - Giambattista Marino and the Academy of Arcadia
XIX (La nuova scienza) - Metastasio, Goldoni, Parini, Alfieri, Foscolo and
Manzoni
XX The rest.
de Sanctis possibly takes for granted the idea of continuity. It may be
different for literary critics and historians of French literature, where
there is a sort of Frankish substratum (Curtius was possibly not of Frankish
origin -- apparently he was of more like North Saxon origin, and his recent
ancestors from the Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine (German: Reichsland
Elsaß-Lothringen or Elsass-Lothringen), i.e. the territory created by the
German Empire in 1871 after it annexed most of Alsace and the Moselle
department of Lorraine following its victory in the Franco-Prussian War. In
this
area, the diverse populations may make for a more complex history of the
literature in the area!
So what de Sanctis would possibly admire about Curtius is how, say, in
something like an extension of de Sanctis's treatment of Alighieri, Curtius
spends some time in tracing the middle Latin 'commonplaces' that bring some
substance to "Divina Commedia". And while I say that Curtius had his critics
in Italy, the idea of tracing this or that Italian author to this or that
classical or middle Latin source is surely not original. My favourite is an
excursus I once read -- when I saw the melodramma "Paolo e Francesca" (by
Rachmaninov -- there is another one by Zandonai, based on D'Annunzio) about
all the commonplaces uttered by Francesca including 'philosophical
sentences' straight from Boezio! So, the onus probandi lies on Curtius about
what
he means by 'middle Latin'. It is obvious that it was part of the 'artes
liberales' to which rhetoric belong to the trivium -- grammar, logic, and
rhetoric -- that every Middle Latin student underwent before the quadrivium
(Geary notes: "Oddly, the trivium gives us 'trivial', but the quadrivium gives
us diddly -- although my aunt used to say, "That's quadrivial," meaning
"That's hardly trivial") -- so WHO IS DENYING the continuity?
The reference to the Dark Ages seems to be the clue. They say it was the
monks who saved Graeco-Roman civilisation from total extinction, but that's a
hyperbole. The "Barbarian" invasions (as the Italians rather stupidly call
them, seeing that the Greeks thought of the Ancient Romans as barbarians
themselves!) brought a lot of positive 'good things' to the proceedings!
SO one has to explore what 'laws' Curtius is criticising. The idea seems to
be that there is a waning or decadence in the dark ages, and middle Ages
in general (maedium aevum) to be rapidly succeeded by the Renaissance of
Graeco-Roman civilisation that started in Tuscany.
But as the OED notes 'medium aevum' may invite the wrong implicature.
Latin has "media aetas", and "medium aevum", and also "medium tempus".
"media tempestas" was first used in Rome in 1469. So, the idea was that whoever
coined the phrase was thinking that there was this period IN BETWEEN the
'ancient' and the 'modern' -- as if we were to have "Hymns: Ancient, Middle,
and Modern). Some think 'medium aevum' is a paraphrase, an odd one, of the
concept of the "Dark Ages" credited to Petrarch, but Petrarch possibly did
not know what 'dark' meant. He is using the word 'figuratively' and as
such not seriously! -- it's a commonplace! Strictly, historians in the Middle
Ages went with
The Six Ages of the World
proposed by St. Augustine and considered themselves in the last age (not
the middle one) before the Apocalypse. People have been predicting the
Rapture forever, it seems.
Back to McEvoy:
"Why introduce hyperbole [or HYPERBOLE]? I doubt Popper would at all hate
the historian for the talk of "induction": this could here be treated as a
harmless affectation; and insofar as a mistaken theory of knowledge
underpins its use, that is mostly the fault of philosophers - or is someone
going
to say, historically, the idea of "induction" became embedded via
historians?"
Well, I don't know. "Embed" is a tricky verb. It's figurative, and it
refers to the bed. Grice thinks that embedded implicatures are the trickiest
phenomena in his area of study.
As Geary notes, "this is not your regular bed". The verb, 'to embed',
meaning 'to lay in a bed of surrounding matter' literally has a geological
sense
(and the rest is implicature). Its sense makes a reference to fossils in
rock as was used in this literal sense in 1778, The first implicatural use
of 'embed' is dated 1835. Geary notes that while the first alleged literal
use of 'embed' may be geological, 'nobody can deny that a bed is a bed is a
bed.' Geary's implicature seems to be that it would be odd for a mother to
embed her child, i.e. lay him in a bed of surrounding matter. Indeed, as
Geary notes, "this can be indeed a very cruel thing to do." "It's different
with a fossil in a rock, you know."
McEvoy:
is someone going to say that the idea of induction became embedded via
historians?
Touché. Trust the wicked philosopher to have embedded the historian into
talking induction!
It may do to explore the overalap INDUCTION/law-in-history.
As a matter of history, if someone is to blame here (for embedding some
historians into talking induction and law) was Carl Hempel, a German, like
Curtius (Although Curtius was born in what is today France).
In any case, Hempel stimulated analytic philosophers' interest in
historical knowledge in his essay, “The Function of General Laws in History”
(1942).
The title of the essay invites the implicature:
a. that there are general laws in history.
b. that they have a history.
But with philosophers you never know until you read the conclusion of the
essay (alla: "Conclusion: I hope you are convinced I have refuted all that
nonsense about (a) there being general laws in history, and (b) their having
a function").
Hempel's general theory of scientific explanation held that a scientific
'explanation' require subsumption under a general law (as when the student is
asked to explain why Anna Bolena was beheaded).
Hempel considered historical explanation as an apparent exception to the
covering-law model.
He possibly considered his historian friends an exception to his other
friends.
Hempel attempted to show the suitability of the covering-law model even to
this special case, "just for the fun of it."
i. Anna Bolena was beheaded.
"Explain."
PREMISES:
-- A king who has become a protestant can divorce.
-- If a king finds his wife is cheating him he can behead him
-- Henry VIII found Anna Bolena was cheating him.
-----------
-- Therefore, by (2) and (3) -- and add (4) for good measure -- he still
wanted a male heir, Anna was beheaded.
(Donizetti found this 'deductive' argument interesting enough to write a
melodramma about it). The issue with Hempel is the general (2) above. Do we
reach it via induction?
Hempel argues that a valid historical explanation must invoke some general
law or other.
His covering-law approach to historical explanation was supported by other
analytical philosophers of science, including Ernest Nagel, another German,
typical of Germans to support themselves.
Hempel's essay provoked a prolonged controversy between supporters who
cited merely INDUCTIVE generalisations about human behaviour as the relevant
alleged general "laws", and critics who argued that historical explanations
are more akin to explanations of individual behaviour (as in "Caesar crossed
the Rubicon") based on interpretation that makes the outcome
comprehensible.
Especially important discussions were offered by William Dray, Michael
Scriven, and Alan Donagan.
Donagan points out the difficulty that sometimese a historical explanation
depends on a merely induction-arrived probabilistic regularity rather than
a universal law, with the use of a non-substitutional quantifier of the
universal kind ("Caesar was murdered", "ALL dictators under a so-called
'republican' regime are murdered").
On his part, Scriven points out the pragmatic (alla Grice) features of
historical explanation. Scriven implicates that an arguments that falls far
short of "deductive" validity (but shines in inductive validity) is
nonetheless VERY sufficient to "explain" a given historical event in a given
context
of belief ("Caesar was murdered; because, his murderers succeeded, and
because their motivation was to get rid of whom they saw as a dictator -- on
top the murderers were convinced that they were doing the right thing!" -- no
use of "all" even if some inductive reasoning is present -- "if your
motivation is to murder someone you think has to be murdered, do it, even if
this means they are going to murder YOU later, or that you will be led to some
sort of 'obligatory' suicide -- vide the sad story of CATONE in Utica -- a
melodramma by Vivaldi).
The most fundamental objection to Hempel's 'nomological' model, however,
are:
First, that there are virtually no good examples of universal laws in
history, whether of human behaviour or of historical event succession.
Donagan (who studied in Oxford under Ryle and Kneale, at Exeter, notes that
Hegel sees laws everywhere, so he shouldn't be trusted.
Second, as Elster has noted, that there are OTHER (e.g.
inductive-modelled) compelling schemata through which we can understand a
historical action
(such as Caesar crossing the Rubicon) and outcomes that do not involve
subsumption under any alleged general laws -- even if these laws are arrived
inductively.
These other schemata include the processes of reasoning through which we
understand individual actions (such as Caesar crossing the Rubicon) —
analogous to the methods of "verstehen" and the interpretation of rational
behavior mentioned in general (Caesar wanted to reach Rome for political rather
than touristy reasons), and the processes through which we can trace out
chains of causation and specific causal mechanisms without invoking any sort
of
alleged universal law (involving 'general' properties that Caesar shares
with other actual or potential historical agents).
A careful re-reading of these debates over the "covering-law model" in
history suggests that the debate takes place largely because of the erroneous
assumption of the unity of science and the postulation of the regulative
logical similarity of all areas of scientific reasoning to a few clear
examples of explanation in a few natural sciences -- where even the idea of
'law'
is questionable -- vide Nancy Cartwright: how the laws of nature LIE --.
The law-based approach to history is alleged to be a deeply impoverished
one, and handicapped from the start in its ability to pose genuinely
important questions about the nature of history and historical knowledge
(consider
the example of Cleopatra's nose).
An explanation of a human action and its outcome should BEST NOT be
understood along the lines of an explanation of why radiators burst when the
temperature falls below zero degrees centigrade.
It is harmful to overlook the fundamental identity of the social sciences
with history, and to mutilate research into human affairs by re-modeling the
social sciences into deformed likenesses of physics, even if the
explanation of why radiators burst when the temperature falls below zero
degrees
centigrede is arrived inductively.
The insistence on naturalistic models -- where some inductively arrived
"Uniformity of Nature" is often invoked -- for historical research leads
easily to a presumption in favour of the covering-law model of explanation,
but
this presumption is misleading.
But how many Oxonian historians took a course in the philosophy of history?
(Oxford can be very parochial and dislikes "the philosophy of X": the only
respectable chairs of philosophy at Oxford are the three W: the Waynflete
chair of metaphysical philosophy, the White chair of moral philosophy, and
the Wykeham chair of logic. There are the Wilde-sponsored John Locke
lectures, but that's a different animal).
McEvoy goes on:
"What Popper would point out is the uncritical use of the term "laws" -"
And I guess he engaged in discussion with Hempel! After all, they shared a
'deductive' approach to thing, but I'm sure Popper found an occasion to
look for divergences in approach!
McEvoy:
"and he might point someone to his book "The Poverty of Historicism" where
he explains how there are no "laws" in history like the "laws" sought in
the natural sciences."
The invited implicature seems to be that it is this that makes historicism
(or any -ism for that matter) poor, but I guess Popper is using 'poor'
figuratively.
McEvoy:
"Anyone who sees some validity in "historicism" should read that [essay by
Popper, "The poverty of historicism']".
-- a title which invites a few implicatures:
a. Historians need not be historicists.
b. Historicists need not be poor: it's Historicism with a capital H that
displays poverty -- and we are all being figurative here.
McEvoy concludes this first part of his commentary:
"This does not mean a 'scientific approach' cannot be taken to history even
if the formulations of history do not often lend themselves to decisive
falsification."
Well, I suppose historians see what they are doing as 'science', but since
interdisciplinariness and multidisciplinariness are now seen as bad thing
(cfr. thd old Renaissance man), I suppose a historian sees himself as a
historian simpliciter rather than a scientist, anyway!
The second point (addressed to Helm) by McEvoy goes:
"Consider the argument that the English Church had fallen into a
disreputable state at the time when Henry VIII broke with Rome (as a premise
for
explaining the break, and subsequent dissolution of the monasteries, in terms
of 'public opinion')."
I like that, because without it, we wouldn't have the dreaming spires of
Oxford. Grice's college, St. John's, was once a monastery! -- and a
Cistercian one at that!
McEvoy:
"We could consider all kinds of "supporting evidence" like statements
critical of the church [of E.] as against statements praising the church and
each of these kinds of evidence would, under a 'scientific approach', be
subject to critical evaluation - e.g. whether the statements critical of the
church [of E.] were expressed privately in diaries or publicly at court (where
the private statements might more likely reflect genuine thoughts)."
This seems to be Grice's point when he mentions cross-examination as merely
'aping' "conversational maxims" (questions are asked when the answers are
already known).
McEvoy:
"But in gathering evidence and assessing it, we should be looking at
evidence not for its inductive effect as supporting evidence but in terms of
its
impact as a counter-example."
or alleged counter-example, for trust a historian to re-interpret the
alleged counterexample not as a 'real' counterexample (or 'falsifier') at all!
McEvoy:
"so our focus should not be looking for what would be consistent with our
argument but what would be inconsistent with it. That is the method of
science applied to history."
I wonder how this applies to Cleopatra's Nose.
Carr (a Cantabrigian, typical, not an Oxonian) mocked the hypothesis of
"Cleopatra's nose" (Pascal's thought that, but for the magnetism exerted by
the nose of Cleopatra on Mark Anthony, there would have been no affair
between the two, and hence the Second Triumvirate would not have broken up,
and
therefore the Roman Republic would have continued). Carr sarcastically
commented that male attraction to female beauty can hardly be considered an
accident at all, and is rather one of the more common cases of cause and
effect
in the world.
McEvoy:
"In this light, we might find it significant that testamentary and other
gifts to the Church [of E.] did not decline in the relevant period, as this
might seem to be a counter-example to the view that the Church was
perceived as having fallen into such a corrupt state that the dissolution of
its
assets by Henry VIII reflected public opinion. This record of testamentary
gifts might be judged more significant and reliable a barometer than public
statements of support for the break and dissolution made at court."
I'm slightly confused because I was adding "[of E.]" to McEvoy's reference
to the Church, where perhaps I shouldn't. Perhaps we should distinguish the
church [C. of E., say] qua institution and 'faith' and the idea of a
monarch as the defender of the faith.
-- EXCURSUS ON "FAITH" and the alleged ambiguity of 'church':
The title 'defender of the faith' was granted on 11 October, 1521 by Pope
Leo X to King Henry VIII.
His wife (the king's wife, not the Pope's wife), Catherine of Aragon, was
ALSO a Defender of the Faith in her own right.
(Pope Leo's reasoning was double here, as logicians call it).
The title was conferred in recognition of Henry's essay Assertio Septem
Sacramentorum (Defense of the Seven Sacraments) -- and to Cateherine by
'transitiveness -- which essay defended the sacramental nature of marriage and
the supremacy of the Pope.
This was also known as the "Henrician Affirmation" and was seen as an
important opposition to the early stages of the Protestant Reformation,
especially the ideas of Martin Luther.
Following Henry's decision to break with Rome in 1530 and establish
himself as head of the C. of E. ("a good thing," in the words of Sellars and
Yeatman, since "England was bound to be C. of E."), the title was revoked by
Pope Paul III (since Henry's act was regarded as an attack on "the Faith").
Paul III was, like Paul Grice, assuming that 'the faith' has only one sense
("Do not multiply senses of 'faith' beyond necessity").
As a result, Henry VII was excommunicated. ("He could care less," Carr
wrote).
However, in 1544, the Parliament (as McEvoy might testify) of England
conferred the title "Defender of the Faith" on King Henry VIII and his
successors, now the defenders of the Anglican faith --.
Is this a breach of semantic parsimony ("Do not multiply the sense of
'faith' beyond necessity")? I don't think so, since it can all be solved easily
by a typology introducing subscripts: 'defender of the faith-1' vs.
'defender of the faith-2'. Faith remains uniguous, or monosemous.
Except the Catholic Mary I, the monarchs remain the Supreme Governors of
the [Anglican] faith (formally above the Archbishop of Canterbury as merely
"Primate", not in Darwin's 'use' of this term).
McEvoy goes on:
"What we do here shares with science the critical approach to evidence (a
non-inductive one, unbeguiled by confirmationist bias in the form of alleged
"supporting evidence"): it falls short of making history a science in that
we often cannot produce a decisive experimental test of a observational
sort where the observation is part of a 'reproducible effect'."
A favourite example of Dummett was, to provoke Strawson:
i. The queen of England is bald.
Dummett meant Elizabeth I, the daughter of Henry VIII. As an intuitionist,
Dummett argues that historical sentences are not 'observable' in principle
(unless we examine the cranium of Elizabeth I and check whether she could
be posthumously diagnosed as 'bald' -- the example is Russell, who joked on
the Hegelians loving a synthesis and concluding that the king of France
wears a wig).
McEvoy concludes: "But we will produce much better history using a
scientific approach than using either the false historicist promise of "laws of
history" or the uncritical use of facts consistent with our 'hypothesis' as if
these provide decisive "supporting evidence" -"
There seems actually to be an alternative, which happens to be my
favourite: Danto's approach to the philosophy of history based on 'facts' now
understood as 'individual actions' -- but admittedly it fails to explain very
properly the French revolution, which was tricky even to Carlyle!
McEvoy: "as in science, what is most decisive in favour of any historical
'hypothesis' is absence of counter-evidence. But because historical debate
cannot usually be reduced to decisive observational tests, we find our
debates turn on weighing different kinds of counter-evidence"
or negative evidence, as we may also call it. But do historians spend much
(or enough) time assessing their students's critical examination of
'counter-evidence'? (cfr. "My history teacher is not interested in evidence.
His
last assignment was for me to collect all the counter-evidence I could
gather about the Russian Revolution of 1917!" "Clever! You should transfer to
the philosophy programme!")
Cheers,
Speranza
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