THE SENSE OF THE PAST Lionel Trilling

THE SENSE OF THE PAST

Lionel Trilling

[Lecture notes by Dr. S. Sreekumar]

Disclaimer

Scholars,  please note:

These study materials on Trilling are only for classroom purposes. The explanations are not original in any sense but taken from various sources. These notes are offered with the sole intention of helping students and research scholars with a quick overview of Trilling’s ideas. Those who would like to have a deeper or original study of the subject must look elsewhere for assistance.

A Brief Summary  [ 1300 words]

At the outset, Trilling questions the status of the study of literature in the Universities of the United States. He says that what is studied is not literature but its history. There is a dispute in the Universities between ‘criticism’ and ‘scholarship’— ‘criticism’ is seen as the aggressor and ‘scholarship’ the defender. The study of literature is often viewed with suspicion. Considering literature as an object of knowledge removes the active power of literature.

Often, literary history tries to approximate the methods of science. The genetic study of art is one such method. The genetic study may give ‘added value’ to a work but the study may easily become ‘vulgarized’ when the conditions are treated as primary and the work as secondary.  The genetic study may give a degree of certainty to a work but such scientific certainty is neither needed nor desirable. New critics revolted against the scientific study of literature. They wished to restore the autonomous status of literature and to see it as an agent of power.

Trilling enumerates some of the faults of New Critics:-

a) They thought that anything can be discovered through hard work. b) Elucidation of concepts like irony and ambiguity became rituals and c) They forgot that literature is basically a historical art.

Literature is historical in 3 different ways:-

1. In ancient times the poet was a reliable historian of the personal/national/cosmological events.

2. Literature is historical because any work exists by virtue of its connection to a past work/works, and

3.  Pastness gives the work an additional ‘aesthetic quality’. 

Trilling sees the historical sense as both negative and positive. But nobody can escape from it. Historical sense is necessary to appreciate literature. The ‘historicity’ of literature was rejected by New Critics.

One must be aware of the past as past. Then only it will be alive and present. Making Shakespeare a contemporary will make him monstrous. Shakespeare becomes a contemporary when one realizes that he was a man of his age. The validity and relevance of his work remain in its pastness.

Anti-historical critics are under the illusion that a man can think like another of another period. They forget that historical sense is required to admire a poem written even a hundred years before. Historical sense is one of the aesthetic and critical faculties. Even the New Critics who were against the historical sense employed the same when they showed their preference to the poetry of the seventeenth century.

Trilling wants to refine the historical sense and make it ‘more exact’. He quotes Hume on causation in culture. One must not assign causes that never existed. Artists are delicate souls and are related to the mass of people of their period. Thus the taste and spirit of a whole people may have to be considered as general causes and principles. 

According to Trilling sense of history has to be kept properly complicated. He suggests some ways through which literary scholars can give proper complications to history.

Whether human nature has remained the same or not, the ‘expression’ of human nature has changed over the centuries. The expression of human nature is through conventions. Conventions acquire meaning only because of life. The relationship between emotion and the convention available for its expression is a complicated one. Any simple solution to this problem is a sign of failure.

Whitehead suggests a step that can complicate the sense of the past. He thinks that the ‘assumed ideas’ of a period are more important than the ‘expressed ideas’. The assumed ideas appear obvious to the people—they never know that they are assuming them. The stress on assumed ideas rather than on expressed ones will certainly help to complicate the sense of the past.

Relating the poet to his/her environment can complicate the sense of the past. The poet is created by the environment, but he/she has a role in the creation of the same environment.  Similarly, ‘the question of influence can complicate the sense of the past if we use ‘influence’ in all its complexity. Awareness of the nature of the transmission of ideas is another means to complicate the past. An idea is the formulation of a response to a particular situation. Ideas are limited and they recur. Thus, ideas may acquire some autonomy leading us to believe that they are responsible for events.

Similarly, semanticists would like everyone to believe that words are responsible for the troubles of humanity. Trilling points out that words cannot control ‘us unless we desire to be controlled’ by them. The same is true of ideas also. Ideas can neither save nor betray anyone. Again, it is erroneous to believe that ideas are immutable. Some academicians seriously believe that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were responsible for Nazism. Some others blame the Romantic Movement for racial theories like Nazism. They forget that though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the ideas of the Romantic Movement were available throughout Europe and America, only Germany responded to them in a particular way.  

Trilling regrets that the study of history has fallen into a ‘low estate’ among the students of literature. The educated classes depreciate historical considerations by pointing out ‘the dullness and deadness and falsifications which have resulted from the historical study of literature’. Nietzsche said that the historical sense is an actual faculty of the mind, a ‘sixth sense’ and that the ‘credit for the recognition of its status must go to the nineteenth century’. Ironically, we do not give much credit to the ideas and recommendations of the nineteenth century and ‘our coldness to historical thought’ emanates from the belief that it is ‘the past’ that caused all our troubles and the nineteenth century is the ‘most blameworthy of all the culpable centuries’.

Karl Marx expressed ‘the secret hope’ of our time that man’s ‘life in history’ will come to an end. The self-extinction of history is ‘progress’. Humans yearn for a life which is ‘satisfactory once for all’. They do not want to be reminded of the past because of the mistakes and failures.

History as ‘a continuum of events’ is unlikely to end. Man will be going on making his choices and mistakes. Nietzsche knew this better than others and he had ‘considerable sympathy for our impatience with history’.  He thought that the historical sense has certain virtues like making men ‘unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self-control and self-renunciation’. He also found fault with the historical sense for preventing men from ‘having the ability to respond to the very highest and noblest developments of culture, making them suspicious of what is wholly completed and fully matured’. This ‘ambivalent attitude’ of Nietzsche gives him authority when he defines what the historical sense is and does.

Nietzsche defined the historical sense as the capacity for realizing ‘the order of the rank of the valuation according to which a people, a community, or an individual has lived’. In the case of a community or people,  the valuations are expressed not only ‘by the gross institutional facts of their life’ but also by their morals and manners, and by their philosophy and art. Trilling says that the twentieth century urgently needs the instinct for realizing the order of rank of cultural expressions. ‘Our growing estrangement from history must be understood as the sign of our desperation’.

Nietzsche had an ‘acute’ capacity to divine the order or rank of cultural things. He never separated his historical sense from his sense of art.  He considered them not as two but as one. His definition prescribes that culture must ‘be studied and judged as life’s continuous evaluation of itself’. This culture will never find full expression in ‘the operating forces’ (the gross institutional facts of life). But it will never find the expression ‘at all’ without reference to the ‘gross institutional facts’. [1297 words]

Detailed Analysis with Critical Comments

At the outset, Trilling questions the status of the study of literature in the Universities of the United States. What is studied in Universities is not literature but the history of literature. According to him,  it was John Jay Chapman (notes ¹) who condemned the ‘archaeological, quasi-scientific, and documentary study of the fine arts’ for the first time. Chapman condemned it because it tried to ‘express the fluid universe of many emotions in terms drawn from the study of physical sciences’.

Comments: Physical sciences operate on scientifically proven facts. The basic principles of these sciences go on changing as more and more facts are discovered. The universe of imaginary literature is seldom based on scientifically proven facts. Trying to express this fluid (uncertain) universe of imaginary literature with terms borrowed from physical sciences will certainly lead to wrong conclusions.

The ‘issue’ between Criticism and Scholarship

After Chapman’s time, the ‘issue in the Universities is in the form of opposition of ‘criticism’ and ‘scholarship’. In the ‘issue’ between ‘criticism’ and ‘scholarship’, ‘criticism’ was the aggressor and ‘scholarship’ the defender. The world has become ‘less and less responsive’ to literature, and literature is very often viewed with suspicion.

Comments: The attempt to control ‘imaginative literature’ using state machinery (which we saw in the erstwhile Soviet Union and many other authoritarian countries/societies) is because of a bureaucratic suspicion of literature. McCarthyism of the 1950s showed that even democratic societies might, at times, be suspicious of literature. For example, Arthur Miller (the dramatist) was accused of Communist sympathies. Miller related the paranoia of his accusers to the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century and The Crucible was born]. Trilling points out that the existence of ‘the historical study of literature’ in Universities is a by-product of suspicion. Historical study of literature tries to put literature into a verifiable straitjacket of history.

Traditional scholarship considers literature as an object of knowledge. This view denies /obscures the active power of literature. ‘All sorts of studies are properly ancillary to the study of literature’. In this context, Trilling turns his attention to the work of Professor Lovejoy [ notes ²] an influential philosopher of the twentieth century. In his The Great Chain of Being, Lovejoy asserts that for ‘the study of the history of ideas a really dead writer is better than one whose works are still enjoyed’. Trilling disparagingly points out that such views make us no better than the ‘Edinburgh body snatchers’.

Comments: This is a very interesting comparison/observation. During the early 19th century Edinburgh became a major European center for medical and anatomical studies. Research in anatomy needed a steady supply of cadavers. Unscrupulous elements made huge profits by digging out the bodies of the deceased and selling them to medical researchers. Two notorious criminals, William Burke and William Hare were attracted to cadaver trade because of the easy money. They committed at least 16 murders over 10 months and sold the cadavers to a medical researcher.

Criticism vs. History of Literature

·        Literary history faithfully followed social and political history. It allied itself with the physical sciences of the nineteenth century. Literary history had many successes. It proved that in an age of science, more prestige could be gained by ‘approximating the methods of science’.

·        Of these methods ‘the most notable and the most adaptable’ is the genetic study of art. The genetic study looks at ‘how the work of art came into being’. The genetic study is not ‘inimical to the work of art’. On the other hand, it can take on ‘an added value’.

·        But the ‘genetic study can be easily vulgarized, and in its vulgar form, it can indeed reduce the value of a thing’.  For example, in much genetic study it is found that the work of art becomes secondary and the conditions which created it become primary.

Comments: Reducing a work to the conditions that created it is like throwing the baby with the bathwater. When a study concentrates on the conditions which created a work rather than on the work itself, the study becomes ‘vulgarized’, as Trilling points out.

·        ‘One of the attractions of the genetic study is that it seems to offer a high degree of certainty’. Trilling believes that there are ‘different kinds as well as different degrees of certainty’. He adds that ‘the great mistake of the scientific-historical scholarship is that it looks for a degree and kind of certainty that literature does not need and cannot allow’. This error occurs when literary scholars seek a certainty ‘analogous [similar, equivalent] with the certainty of science’.

Comments: The certainty of a scientific discipline is unattainable for a literary work. Trilling believes that such a certainty is neither needed nor desirable for a work of art.  

·        Up to a point, ‘the scientific study of literature is legitimate and fruitful’. He says that one must identify (and never cross) ‘the terminal point’ of such studies. Similarly, one must never think that the scientific study of literature will provide ‘the experience of literature’.

·        In this context, Trilling recollects ‘the revolt’ of the New Critics against the application of scientific knowledge to the study of literature. They wished to restore the autonomous quality of art and see it as ‘an agent of power’ rather than as ‘an object of knowledge’.

The faults of New Criticism

1.     The chief fault of the New Critics is that ‘they try too hard’. [The same is true about the ‘scientific-historical scholars’ too]. They fall into the common error ‘that Chapman (notes 1) denounced’— that ‘great modern illusion that anything….whatever can be discovered through hard intellectual work and concentration’.

Thus the New Critics made ‘the elucidation of poetic ambiguity or irony a kind of intellectual callisthenic ritual’ [Exercises (like push-ups and jumping jacks) to develop strength and flexibility]. But Trilling says that ‘we can forgive them their strenuousness’. They changed the reader’s relationship with language. They tried to ‘make methodical and explicit what was once immediate and unformulated’.

Comments: The language of poetry was never closely studied until the ascendancy of New Criticism. We may recall the contribution of critics like William Empson [Seven Types of Ambiguity] and Cleanth Brooks [The Well Wrought Urn]. Critics like them made a meticulous analysis of the language used in poetry and often revealed to us dimensions we never suspected].

2.       Another fault of the New Critics is that in their reaction to the historical method, they forgot that the ‘historicity of a work’ is a fact in aesthetic experience. Trilling points out that literature will always be a historical study, ‘for literature is a historical art’. It is historical in three different ways.

Comment: New Criticism asserts that the text is more important than the historical/biographical elements that are/were instrumental in its creation.

a.       In the past, the poet was supposed to be a historian—‘a reliable chronicler of events’. Thucydides [notes ³] and Aristotle believed that they were historians and ‘we suppose that a large part of literature is properly historical, the recording and interpreting of personal, national, and cosmological events’.

b.      Literature is historical ‘in the sense that it is necessarily aware of its own past’— may not be ‘consciously’ but ‘practically’. ‘The work of any poet exists by reason of its connexion with past work, both in continuation and in divergence, and what we call his originality is simply his special relation to tradition’.

Comment: Here Trilling repeats the ideas developed by T.S. Eliot in Tradition and Individual Talent].

Trilling cites Eliot to remind the readers that ‘each poet’s relation to tradition changes tradition itself’. Thus the history of literature is never static for a long time, it is also not ‘an additive kind of growth’. In every new age the pattern is repeated—what was once dominant is forgotten and new affinities are developed. Thus ‘we read any work within a kaleidoscope of historical elements’ [constantly changing].

Comment: For example, in the Romantic Age, Alexander Pope of the previous age was forgotten. [We should not miss the irony of Dr. Johnson’s remarks on Pope: "If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?". So much for literary reputations!]   The Romantics were abandoned by the nineteenth century. What awaited the nineteenth century was even worse. They were cited as bad examples and corrupt influences by the twentieth-century critics.

c.       ‘Pastness’ or ‘historicity’ of a work is very important. In some cases, this ‘pastness’ renders an additional ‘aesthetic quality’ to the work and contributes to its aesthetic power. The ‘elements of history’ modifies the formal elements in a work [like prosody or diction]. In a complete aesthetic study, these historical elements also have to be considered.

Comment: Even in a formal study of the Odes of Keats, we cannot ignore the historical development of the Ode as a genre.

Trilling writes— “It is part of the given of the work, which we cannot help but respond to”. ‘The New Critics imply that this situation should not exist, but it cannot help existing, and we have to take it into account’.

Comment: The New Critics were always against the study of the historical background of a work since such studies would be against their assertion that a work is an autonomous entity.

Sense of the Past: - Trilling says, “We are creatures of time, we are creatures of the historical sense”. The historical sense assumed a new dimension since the time of Walter Scott.

Comment: Scott was the greatest practitioner of the historical novel. His Waverley novels were instrumental in creating a sense of the past among the British readers during the nineteenth century.

The historical sense is not a totally positive quality. Without that ‘we might be more certain, less weighed down and apprehensive’. At the same time,  ‘we might also be less generous, and certainly, we would be less aware’. But whatever may be the case, humans have ‘the sense of the past and must live with it, and by it’.

Trilling asserts that a sense of the past is necessary to read literature. Otherwise one would be ‘like Partridge at the play, wholly without the historical sense’. To appreciate Hamlet, a sense of the past is required. This sense need not be highly instructed. It can simply be a ‘belief that there is such a thing as the past’.

Comments: ‘Partridge at the Play’ is an extract from Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1707–1754). Partridge’s observations when he saw Hamlet (enacted in a playhouse) showed how naïve he was to the nuances of the theatre. He laughed at the most famous actor of the century, David Garrick, (who acted as Hamlet in the play) for showing fear at the entry of the ghost. Then again he complained that the gravediggers took too much time in digging the grave. It is obvious from the observations that he had no sense of what happens in a theatre.

The New Critics rejected the ‘historicity’ of a work because they thought that by rejecting the past they made the work ‘more immediate and more real’. They believed that between ‘Now’ and ‘Then’ there is no difference because the spirit of the man is ‘one and continuous’. Trilling differs. He asserts that one must be aware of the past as past. Then only one can feel it ‘alive and present’. Any attempt to make Shakespeare a contemporary will make him ‘monstrous’.

Comments: Many twentieth-century Feminist critics have often cited Hamlet as an example of anti-feminist ideas. Similarly,  The Merchant of Venice was/is condemned for its presumed anti-Semitism. Those critics who make Shakespeare anti-feminist make him their contemporary. They forget that the Western world in Shakespeare’s time was male- dominated. The sexual objectification of women was normal in that society and women were seen as the property of their husbands. For example in 3.2.111-113 of Hamlet, Hamlet focuses solely on Ophelia’s sexual organs, playing on the dual meaning of ‘nothing’.  Ophelia is not at all offended by this language. Similarly, those who denounce Shakespeare for anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice, forget that during the sixteenth century, anti-Semitic feelings were rampant in Western Europe. Thus Shakespeare may appear ‘monstrous’ if we view his plays from the contemporary point of view].

Trilling says: ‘He (Shakespeare) is contemporaneous only if we know how much a man of his age he was; he is relevant to us only if we see his distance from us’. Trilling provides another example to underline this point. If Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode is viewed as a contemporary work, one may not appreciate it. So too with The Prelude. ‘In the pastness of these works lies the assurance of their validity and relevance’.

Trilling, then, takes up a much-discussed issue: ‘What is the real poem? Is it the poem we now perceive? Is it the poem the author consciously intended? or  Is it the poem the author intended and his first readers read?’.  The poem is all these ‘depending on the state of our knowledge’. Besides, it is the poem ‘as it has existed in history, as it has lived its life from Then to Now’. The poem is something which ‘submits itself to one kind of perception’ in one age and another kind in another age. It wields a different kind of power in each age. The poem is thus something that can never be fully understood. The mysterious and ‘unreachable part of the poem is one of its aesthetic elements’.

To assume that one can think like another of another period is an illusion. It is like the illusion that ‘we can think in a wholly different way’. Anti-historical critics are often under this illusion. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Pen Warren are examples. In their ‘admirable poetry text book’ (Understanding Poetry) they ‘disclaim all historical intention’. But one wonders why they never asked the question: ‘What effect is created by our knowledge that the language of a particular poem is not such as would be uttered by a poet writing now?’ The fact is that to admire a poem written even a hundred years before requires translation of the ‘historical circumstances’ and the ‘metaphors’. The trained critic may forget this because ‘his own historical sense is often so deeply ingrained that he is not wholly conscious of it, and sometimes, for reasons of his own, he prefers to keep it merely implicit’. But whether conscious or not, the historical sense is ‘one of the aesthetic and critical faculties’. 

The picture becomes clearer when one looks at the preference of the New Critics themselves. They found ‘all poetic virtue’ in the poetry of the seventeenth century and the ‘essence of poetic error’ in Romantic poetry. They were doing nothing ‘illegitimate’. They were simply ‘involving their aesthetics with certain cultural preferences, they were implying choices in religion, metaphysics, politics, and manners’. Trilling makes his point clear: ‘And in so far as they were doing this by showing a preference for a particular period of the past, which they brought into comparison with the present, they were exercising their historical sense’. One can question their ‘attitude of making the historical sense irrelevant to their aesthetic’.

Trilling says that the historical sense has to be refined and made ‘more exact’. The question of ‘causation in culture’ becomes important here. Hume raises some interesting questions on ‘causation in culture’.

Notes and comments: David Hume (1711 - 1776), Scottish philosopher, economist and historian of the Age of Enlightenment, spoke about causation thus in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: ‘We understand matters of fact according to causation, or cause and effect … our experience of one event leads us to assume an unobserved cause. Hume argues that assumptions of cause and effect between two events are not necessarily real or true. It is possible to deny causal connections without contradiction because causal connections are assumptions not subject to reason. (In other words, there can be effects without any causes). We cannot justify our assumptions about the future based on  experience unless there is a law that the future will always resemble the past. No such law exists. Similarly, Hume does not think we should spend time and energy on questions such as whether God exists, what the soul is, or whether the soul is immortal. He claims that because the mind is not meant to help us discover and define truths, we will never be able to come to any definite and rational conclusions about abstract matters.

About ‘causation in culture’ Hume writes that one must approach the subject with caution. Otherwise one might ‘assign causes that never existed and reduce what is merely contingent (conditional, provisional) to stable and universal principles’. Hume adds that ‘cultivators of the arts’ are few and their minds are ‘delicate and easily perverted’. Therefore ‘chance or secret or unknown causes’ must have a great influence on ‘the rise and progress’ of all fine arts. But the artists are related to ‘the mass of people’ of their time. Therefore the taste, genius,  and spirit of a whole people may have to be considered as general causes and principles.

Comments: National pride at the rise of England as a naval power was the basis for many History Plays/poems written during the Elizabethan period. Similarly, the rise of democracy in the eighteenth century may be considered a contributing factor to the rise of prose fiction where ordinary human beings (not Kings and Princes) get heroic roles.

The ‘refinement of our historical sense’ means that it has to be kept ‘properly complicated’. History ‘involves abstraction’, in the sense that one abstracts (makes a summary of) certain events from others. This abstraction (summary) has an aim and purpose. ‘Try as we may, we cannot, as we write history, escape our purposiveness’ (In the sense of conscious design).

[When we take up an assignment to write about a particular period in history, we cannot wish away our purposiveness]

There is no need to escape from purposiveness because ‘purpose and meaning are the same…’ But one must remember that ‘abstraction is not perfectly equivalent to the infinite complication of events from which something is abstracted’. Trilling suggests a few ways through which literary scholars can give ‘appropriate complication’ to history.

·        First, he takes up the question of human nature. Is human nature always the same? If so in what way? However,  the expression of human nature has certainly changed.

Comments: Human nature was expressed through literature and other fine arts in different ways in different ages/periods. Here The Ramayana provides a classic example. A. K. Ramanujan [Poet, scholar, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright] writes that in Sanskrit alone there are twenty-five or more renditions of the epic. There are sculptures, mask plays, puppet plays and shadow plays around the epic. One researcher, Camille Bulcke, counted 300 ‘telling’ of the epic. Millions of Indians have read and "watched" the epic in popular comic books and TV series. The story of The Ramayana is available in at least 22 languages, including Chinese, Laotian, Thai, and Tibetan. Many of these languages have more than one ‘telling’ of the epic.

The relationship between expression and feeling has to be kept in mind. E. E. Stoll, the well-known Shakespearean critic solves the problem ‘between what he calls convention and what he calls life’. [Convention = expression, life =feeling]. Stoll insists that ‘convention’ and ‘life’ are not connected at all. According to him, Shakespeare is not psychologically or philosophically acute [serious, important] because these are terms that we use of ‘life’. Shakespeare was dealing only with ‘convention’. This view makes the relation of ‘convention’ to ‘life’ very important but at the same time it ‘misses the point that ‘life’ is always expressed through ‘convention’ and in a sense always is ‘convention’ and conventions get meaning only because of the intentions of life’.

Comments:  Trilling deals with two terms— ‘convention’ and ‘life’— here. When we attempt to express life through literature we have to depend on certain conventions. Tragedy, Comedy, Lyric, Sonnet, Epic, etc. are based on conventions only. Conventions get meaning only when they are related to life. It is interesting to note that even a film on ‘star- wars’ follows certain conventions. The film, based on conventions, gets meaning only when the characters (from remote galaxies speaking English?) express human emotions].  

Professor Stoll assumes that Shakespeare’s audience was ‘conscious of convention’. Trilling disagrees. He says that the audience was ‘aware’ of the convention but not ‘conscious’ of it. ‘…what they were conscious of was life, into which they made an instantaneous translation of all that took place on the stage’. The ‘problem’ of the interaction between emotion and ‘the convention available to express it’ and the mutual ‘influence’ they exert on each other are complex. The difficulties of the problem should be admitted. Any simple solution for this is a ‘sign of failure’.

Comments: Here Trilling is suggesting a method to provide ‘appropriate complication to ‘our notion of history’. Human emotions are expressed in art through conventions. Tragedy, comedy, epic, sonnet, novel, etc. are based on conventions. The interaction between human emotion and convention is always complicated. The literary scholar can maintain complications without trying to find simple solutions.

·        Another step to complicate the sense of the past was provided by Whitehead.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861 –1947) — English mathematician and philosopher— a defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another.  Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts so that all our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us.” [At any given time, we are never the same as we were before.  As Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”]

Whitehead preferred the ‘assumed ideas of an age’ and not the ‘expressed ideas’.

Comments: All the ideas assumed may not be expressed. For instance, many ideas we assume about others [religious minorities, women, differently-abled, etc.] may not be expressed in any form. They may remain submerged in the subconscious of our race.

The assumed ideas are those which appear ‘so obvious that people do not know that they are assuming them because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them’.

Comments: This is especially true of many people who assume so many things without any concrete evidence to back up. Bertrand Russell writes, ‘We are all, whatever part of the world we come from, persuaded that our nation is superior to all others. Seeing that each nation has its characteristic merits and demerits, we adjust our standard of values to make out that the merits possessed by our nation are the really important ones, while its demerits are comparatively trivial. ’

Professor Lovejoy made a ‘regression’ [antonym of progression] in his The Great Chain of Being. [notes ²]. He said that ‘the ideas in serious reflective literature are… in great part philosophical ideas in dilution’.  Trilling says that literature is made a ‘dependent art’ because of a general ‘suspiciousness’. One ‘must question the assumption which gives priority in ideas to the philosopher and sees the movement of thought as always from the systematic thinker’ to the poet who ‘uses’ the ideas ‘in dilution’.

The sense of the past can be complicated through the realization that the expressed ideas are but only a part of the assumed ideas of a period. Trilling warns that prioritizing the philosopher over the poet is a ‘regressive’ step which will not advance our effort to complicate the historical sense.

·        The relation of a poet to his environment is another complex issue. ‘The poet is an effect of environment, but we must remember, that he is no less a cause. He may be used as the barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.’ The merely fundamental meaning of ‘environment’ must not be considered satisfactory. Trilling says that ‘the simple quantitative implication of the word’ (= ‘taking a large and literally environing thing to be always the environment of a smaller thing’) must not satisfy anyone. [He gives two examples to explain the idea of ‘a large and literally environing thing’ as the ‘environment of a smaller thing’].  ‘In a concert room the audience and its attitude (‘large and literally environing thing’) are the environment of the performer (‘a smaller thing’), but the performer and his music also make the environment of the audience’. In a family, likewise, the parents are the ‘chief factors’ in the environment of a child, but the child also is ‘a factor in the environment of the parents and himself conditions the actions of his parents toward him’.

·     Trilling takes up the question of the influence of one writer on another. The term ‘influence’ must be understood in all its complications. Historically, the term implies ‘the infusion of any kind of divine, spiritual, moral, immaterial, or secret power or principle’. But Trilling asserts that the ‘idea of influence’ …ought to be’ far more puzzling. ‘Influence’ becomes puzzling when turned ‘upon ourselves’: ‘What have been the influences that made me the person I am, and to whom would I entrust the task of truly discovering what they were?’

·        Trilling takes up ‘another thing that we have not understood with sufficient complication.’ It is ‘the nature of ideas in their relation to the conditions of their development and in relations to their transmission’. One generally thinks that an idea is like ‘a baton that is handed from runner to runner in a relay race’. But an idea ‘as a transmissible thing’ is more like a sentence in a parlor game.

A parlor game is a sort of indoor game. In the game referred to, a sentence is whispered about in a circle. The amusement comes ‘when the last version is compared with the original’. They will be most often drastically different from each other.

 About the origin of ideas, Trilling says: ‘we ought to remember that an idea is the formulation of a response to a situation; so too, is the modification of an existing idea’.

To a particular situation, a human being responds in a particular way. When this response is given a form, it becomes an idea. Sometimes, Men take up existing ideas and modify them to suit a particular situation.

Trilling explains how ideas get autonomy. The situations in which people/cultures are placed are limited. Hence there is only a limited number of responses and consequently a limited number of ideas. Thus ideas recur. People ‘think habitually’ and ideas persist even when the situations which created them are no longer present. Because of this, ideas gain ‘a certain limited autonomy, and sometimes the appearance of a complete autonomy’. ‘It is supposed that ideas think themselves, create themselves and their descendants, have a life independent of the thinker and the situation’. From this,  it is concluded that ideas are ‘responsible for events’.

·         A similar feeling exists among the intellectual classes about the use of words—a feeling that ‘we are betrayed by words, that words push us against our will’. The ‘tyranny of words’ has become a common phrase. Semanticists believe [and try to make others believe] that the world will be a better place if only Man can escape from the tyranny of words. Trilling quotes Charles Dickens in this context. Dickens said that he was ‘tired of hearing about the tyranny of words’ as ‘he was …less concerned with the way words abuse us than with the way we abuse words’. Words do not create trouble. It is Man’s will that creates trouble. ‘Words cannot control us unless we desire to be controlled by them’. The same is true with ideas also. They can neither betray nor save. Instead of blaming ideas Men must blame ‘bad thinking’. The tendency to blame ideas for human troubles is the ‘great vice of academicism’. He regrets that ‘the errors’ of academicism do not remain in the academy but percolate into the world. Thus ‘what remains as a failure of perception’ among the intellectuals, ‘finds its fulfillment on policy and action’.

·        Belief in the autonomy of ideas becomes strong in times of war. But both sides in the war have to believe in ‘the immutable nature of ideas to which each side owes allegiance’.

Trilling implies that ideas are subject to constant change. It is erroneous to believe that ideas are immutable.

‘What gods are to the ancients at war, ideas are to us’.   Trilling quotes two instances to prove his point.

The first is that of an American professor of philosophy who wrote that the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were responsible for Nazism

[ notes ⁴] and that the virtues of American democracy came from Plato and Athenian society.

The second instance is a biography of Byron written by an English professor when Nazism was at its height. The biographer asserts that ‘the Romantic Movement failed’. Trilling says: ‘… I for one know less and less what it means’. Moreover,   ‘All movements fail, and perhaps the Romantic Movement failed more than most because it attempted more than most; possibly it attempted too much’. Ascribing failure to a movement ‘seems to suggest that literature ought to settle something for good....’

The English biographer then writes about the legacy left behind by the failure of the Romantic Movement. According to him, Nationalism was a product of the Romantic Movement and Nationalism was responsible for racial theories like Nazism. Racial theories still exist in society in several forms that can hardly be recognized. The Romantic Movement is to be blamed for this because ‘it appeals to that strain of anarchism which inhabits a dark corner of every human mind and is continually advancing the charms of extinction against the claim of life’. The Romantic Movement highlights the charm of all that is ‘fragmentary and youthful and half-formed’ against the compact achievement of adult genius.

The argument of the biographer blaming the Romantic Movement for Nazism is absurd. One has to ask why only Germany responded to the ideas when the ideas of Romanticism were available to all nations and people. There is a failure of logic here. More than that what is questionable is the assumption that ‘ideas generate events’ and that ideas are autonomous and that they can ‘seize upon the minds of some men and control their actions independently of circumstance and will’.  

Thus, in the two books mentioned above, historical facts are distorted. The Schopenhauer and Nietzsche mentioned in the books have no real connection to the philosophers with the same names. Similarly, the Plato and Athens have no connection to the real Plato and Athens. Trilling asks some pertinent questions here: Can the ‘anarchism’, the 'fragmentariness' and the immaturity associated with the Romantic Movement [as alleged by the English biographer mentioned above] be related to Kant, or Goethe, or Wordsworth or Beethoven? And how can anyone derive the ‘iron rigidity’, the ‘desperate centralization’, and the ‘systematic cruelty’ of the Nazis from Romantics like Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth or Beethoven?

The answers to both questions are obvious. We can never link the great Romantics to the ideologies propagated by the Nazis. The ‘connection’ between Romanticism and Nazism is far-fetched.

Trilling regrets that the study of history has fallen into a ‘low estate’ among the students of literature as the two books mentioned above suggest. The educated classes depreciate historical considerations by pointing out ‘the dullness and deadness and falsifications which have resulted from the historical study of literature’.

Resistance to history originates from ‘the whole nature of our life today’. Nietzsche said that the historical sense is an actual faculty of the mind, a ‘sixth sense’ and that the ‘credit for the recognition of its status must go to the nineteenth century’. Ironically, much credit is not given to the ideas and recommendations of the nineteenth century and ‘our coldness to historical thought’ emanates from the belief that it is ‘the past’ that caused all the troubles and the nineteenth century is the ‘most blameworthy of all the culpable centuries’. Karl Marx, ‘for whom history was indeed a sixth sense’, expressed ‘the secret hope of our time that man’s ‘life in history’ will come to an end. The self-extinction of history nowadays means ‘progress’. Men yearn for a life which is ‘satisfactory once for all’— ‘a time without end’. They do not want to be reminded of the past because of ‘the considerable possibility that (the) present is but perpetuating mistakes and failures and instituting new troubles’. [History repeats itself?].

History as ‘a continuum of events’ is unlikely to end. Men will continue making their choices and mistakes. Nietzsche knew this better than others and had ‘considerable sympathy for our impatience with history’.  He thought that the historical sense has certain virtues like making men ‘unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self-control and self-renunciation’. He also found fault with the historical sense for preventing men from ‘having the ability to respond to the very highest and noblest developments of culture, making them suspicious of what is wholly completed and fully matured’. This ‘ambivalent attitude’ of Nietzsche gives him authority when he defines what the historical sense is and does.

 Nietzsche defines historical sense as ‘the capacity for divining quickly the order of the rank of the valuation according to which a people, a community, or an individual has lived’. In the case of a community or people,  the valuations are expressed not only ‘by the gross (unrefined) institutional facts of their life’ (what Nietzsche calls ‘the operating forces’) but also by their morals and manners, by their philosophy and art.

Comments: The historical sense is the capacity to divine (anticipate or know beforehand through exceptional wisdom and judgment) the values a community or people had upheld, in the order of their relative importance. These values are expressed through morals, manners, philosophy, and art and not merely through the mundane facts of life. For example, we understand the values of the Elizabethan Age through the morals, manners, philosophy and art of the Age and not merely through mundane historical facts like the Black Death or defeat of the Spanish armada.

The historical sense is ‘the “divining instinct” for the relation of the valuations to the operating forces’. [How the mundane facts of life are related to the values upheld by a community or individual]. It is the sense which life uses to test itself.  The twentieth century urgently needs the instinct for divining the order of rank of cultural expressions. ‘Our growing estrangement (separation) from history must be understood as the sign of our desperation’.

Nietzsche had an ‘acute’ capacity to divine the order or rank of cultural things. His capacity is realized in that he never separated his historical sense from his sense of art.  He considered them not as two but as one. He prescribed that culture must ‘be studied and judged as life’s continuous evaluation of itself’. This culture will never find full expression in ‘the operating forces’ (the gross institutional facts of life). But it will never find the expression ‘at all’ without reference to the ‘gross institutional facts’.

Operating forces or ‘gross institutional facts’ are necessary to understand the culture but at the same time a culture will never be fully expressed through operating forces alone.

Notes

1.      John Jay Chapman (1862-1933) American poet, dramatist, and critic who attacked the get-rich-quick morality of the post-Civil War “Gilded Age” in political action and in his writings. Ancestors on both sides of his family had distinguished themselves in antislavery and other causes, and he sought to continue that tradition among the upper middle classes, whose integrity he felt had been eroded by the upsurge of big business. Chapman wrote some 25 books, including a biography of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist leader (1913); Collected Songs and Poems (1919); and volumes of criticism such as Emerson, and Other Essays (1898), Greek Genius, and Other Essays (1915), and A Glance toward Shakespeare (1922). His fear that the quality of education in the United States was being destroyed by its excessive scale and its servitude to the needs of business was expressed in his New Horizons in American Life (1932). [Encyclopaedia Britannica]

2.      Professor A. O.  Lovejoy (1873 – 1962), American philosopher and intellectual historian, founded the discipline known as the History of Ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being (1936) – regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the History of Ideas in the United States during the twentieth century. As a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University from 1910 to 1938, Lovejoy founded and long presided over that university's History of Ideas Club. In 1940 he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.          A reviewer, Raphael Demos, writes: “Men are galvanized by ideas and act as vehicles for them… Such a ruling idea is that of the great chain of being. Lovejoy's study records the birth, the growth, the vicissitudes, transformations, and finally the senility, and perhaps the death of this idea. The study is as fascinating as that of the rise and decay of an empire, and, in fact, it is the study of the empire of an idea over human minds throughout many centuries… Prof. Lovejoy's approach is fresh and different… The learning exhibited in this book is vast.”― (Modern Language Notes)

3.      Thucydides (born 460 BC or earlier?—died after 404 BC?), greatest of ancient Greek historians and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the struggle between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC. His work was the first recorded political and moral analysis of a nation’s war policies. Thucydides and Herodotus are called the founders of the writing of history. [Encyclopaedia Britannica]

4. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860) German philosopher, often called the “philosopher of pessimism,” He was the exponent of a metaphysical doctrine of the will in immediate reaction against idealism. His writings, especially his masterpiece The World as Will and Idea influenced existential philosophy and Freudian psychology. Schopenhauer was very much influenced by the philosophy of Vedānta and the mysticism of the Vedas (Hindu scriptures). The Upaniṣads, together with Plato and Kant, constituted the foundation on which he erected his philosophical system.

Schopenhauer turned away from spirit and reason to the powers of intuition, creativity, and the irrational. His thought greatly influenced Nietzsche and through Nietzsche the ideas and methods of life philosophy, existential philosophy, and anthropology. Nietzsche’s ideas are connected to modern psychology and to Sigmund Freud and his school. Within the German cultural realm, Schopenhauer’s influence on music and literature brings to mind such diverse names as Richard Wagner, Hans Pfitzner, Wilhelm Busch, Gerhart Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, and Thomas Mann. [Encyclopaedia Britannica]

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 --1900), German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. His observation that “God is dead,” determined the agenda for many of Europe’s most-celebrated intellectuals after his death. Although he was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by fascists to advance the very things he loathed.

The association of Nietzsche’s name [and through him that of Schopenhauer’s] with Adolf Hitler and fascism owes much to the use [misuse] made of his works by his sister, Elisabeth. Elisabeth maintained ruthless control over Nietzsche’s literary estate and, dominated by greed, produced collections of his “works” consisting of discarded notes. She also committed petty forgeries. Generations of commentators were misled. Equally important, her enthusiasm for Hitler linked Nietzsche’s name with that of the dictator in the public mind.

In the first place, Nietzsche loathed anti-Semites in whom he saw personified the malevolent spirits of resentment and envy. Anti-Semitism was the emotion for weak, lower people, for whom ‘someone must be to blame for the fact that I do not feel well’. In Human, All Too Human (1878), he wrote of how lowly men hated the Jews on account of ‘their energy and higher intelligence, their capital spirit and will, which accumulated from generation to generation in the long school of their suffering’, and that the success of this higher people ‘awakens envy and hatred’, making Jews ‘scapegoats for every possible public and private misfortune’. [Encyclopaedia Britannica]

Dr. S. Sreekumar, 

Professor of English (Retd.)

Govt. Arts College, Coimbatore

Tamil Nadu.