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| B"H |
7 JUL/14
“Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which
has lost its significance.”
--Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age”
The general outlines of the Google Books project are simple in principle and
stunning in size. Collaborating with major libraries around the globe, Google
has undertaken to scan all known existing books and to make them accessible to
the electronically connected public. Started a decade ago in 2004, Google has
already digitized roughly a quarter of the estimated 130 million books
available worldwide. The completion of the collection is scheduled for 2020.
I know that a lot of fellow historians and cultural and literary critics are
utterly excited about the ease that Google Books lends to their research. I
myself have used Google’s digital archive repeatedly. Thanks to Google
Books, the research for a footnote on the European administrative literature
regarding the remuneration of tower guards around the time of the French
Revolution, for instance, took me no longer than 45 minutes. In even less
time, I could have shown that the usage of the German word for “tower
guard” (Türmer) spikes around the threshold of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries—or so Google’s ‘Ngram Viewer,’ which indicates
the frequency of any given word in books from any given span of time, tells
me.
(Google’s Ngram Viewer: Here showing the frequency of the word “Türmer”
(tower guard) in German books between 1750 and 1850.)
But such facile historical work, which can draw on a hitherto unexplored
breadth of past knowledge, remains essentially idle unless we have a good
notion of the status of the past for our present reality. Ironically, the
current lack of such a notion is in large part due to the very company that
created the online library. Google helps us to bring the analog past closer to
us than any past has ever been to any previous generation, but the very
technology that makes this preservation possible sets us forever apart from
our past. Ever since the arrival of Google and the digital revolution that it
helped shape, we no longer read, think, or remember the same way we did
before. If we want to make good use of Google’s digital library—and why
not profit from such a gigantic archive?—we have to confront the question of
how to relate to a tradition of past knowledge that is out of touch with our
present reality.
If there is a text from before the days of the Internet that can contribute
something to this question, it is Hannah Arendt’s farsighted 1961 essay
“Tradition and the Modern Age.” Instead of trying to safeguard any single
concept or thought from our philosophical tradition between Plato and Marx,
Arendt encourages us in her essay to look at the founding and dissolving
moments of this tradition as models of thinking—of the willingness to turn
around the existing conceptual hierarchies and to break with previous
intellectual authorities. What Arendt aims to make us see in the tradition are
its repeated moments of inner revolution. It is this testified lineage of
radical thinking that is still relevant to a world that has forever turned
away from all and any concrete content of the tradition.
In her recapitulation of the historical process in which the philosophical
tradition since Plato has lost its hold on the present, Arendt focuses first
on a series of nineteenth century thinkers—Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche.
These thinkers recognized that the modern world, which had been shaped by the
industrial, political, and scientific revolutions, needed a new philosophy.
They were frustrated to see a meaningless philosophical tradition survive as
the fetish of an educated bourgeoisie that valued philosophical education
purely as a marker of social distinction and not because it had anything to
say about the contemporary world.
Arendt goes on to show how in the twentieth century both the bourgeoisie’s
philistinism and the avant-garde’s upheaval against tradition ceased to
exist. The totalitarian regimes that Arendt saw rise in her lifetime made the
break between history and the inadequateness of the traditional theoretical
language so strikingly clear that neither the philistines’ preservation of
tradition nor the direct reversal of the tradition that was the project of the
nineteenth century avant-garde seemed possible any longer. To most of her
contemporaries, Arendt claims, traditional culture simply appeared “like a
field of ruins which, far from being able to claim any authority, [could]
hardly command their interest.”
What may have seemed a prophetic exaggeration in the still fairly conservative
climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s has by now certainly become a
reality. It is indicative of this final loss of tradition, for instance, that
no national literature department at any European or American university would
even attempt to justify its existence with appeal to the conservation of the
cultural heritage. Such appeal to our tradition survives today only in the
domain of commercial beer brewers and whiskey distillers. What the historical
rupture of the totalitarian regimes hasn’t accomplished, the globalization
and digitization of our existence has. Globalization has made evident the
inadequacy of our nationally biased canons of learnedness without yet
supplying us with a new global canon. The digital revolution with its
introduction of search engines, hyperlinks, and social networking has changed
our habits of reading and communicating so drastically that already the mere
form of most of our traditional education—novels, plays, and philosophical
treatises—has become fundamentally foreign to us.
Instead of mourning this loss of relevance of the past, however, Arendt
invites us to see in it “the great chance to look upon the past with eyes
undistracted by any tradition, with a directness which has disappeared from
Occidental reading and hearing ever since Roman civilization submitted to the
authority of Greek thought.” After two thousand years of submission to the
dictate of tradition, tradition has finally lost its last significance, and we
are free to look at the past with great equanimity and intellectual freedom.
The question that remains, however, is why we should look at our past at all?
Why should we care to engage in a past whose primary concepts seem to convey
no meaning to contemporary reality and whose knowledge is no longer considered
a value or accomplishment? We may now have the ability to look at the past
untinged by any false belief in its authority, but this untinged gaze
resembles very much the blank stare of the uninitiated museumgoer in front of
some abstract piece of modern art. We just don’t know what it means and why
we should care.
To show why and how it might still be worthwhile to look at an eminently
obsolete tradition, Arendt turns once more to the upheaval against the
tradition by the nineteenth century avant-garde. I cannot do justice here to
the details of Arendt’s learned analysis of the ways in which Marx
overturned the classical philosophical prevalence of theory over action,
Nietzsche questioned the Platonic authority of the mental over the sensual,
and Kierkegaard reversed the established relationship between reason and
faith. But what’s important to understand in Arendt’s argument is that
Kierkegaard’s, Marx’s, and Nietzsche’s upheavals against the tradition
remained essentially bound to the very tradition they sought to overthrow. Not
only did their negation of the tradition still rely on the old philosophical
vocabulary, but, more importantly, the very gesture of upheaval was itself
inherited from the tradition. What Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche undertook
would have been impossible without Plato’s original “turning-about” that
founded philosophy: the turning-about of those men of the cave who dared to
abandon the shadow play projected on the walls and to look instead at the real
things. This gesture of upheaval and turning-about, Arendt claims, founded our
tradition, but it was subsequently forgotten in the centuries that mindlessly
deferred to the authority of Plato and Co. Only at the point when this
tradition saw its end in the nineteenth century was it possible to disclose
the tradition’s revolutionary beginnings once more.
Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche stimulate our appreciation of the tradition,
not because they attest to the relevance of any traditional concept or
thought, but because they orient us towards the tradition’s original
chutzpa. Without falling prey to the temptation to assign any false
meaningfulness to an obsolete past, Arendt invites us in her essay
“Tradition and the Modern Age” to appreciate with Kierkegaard, Marx, and
Nietzsche the audacity of traditional thinking.
It is a sentiment as trivial as it is accurate that the world is changing at a
fast pace and that most traditional theories are annoyingly out of touch with
our contemporary concerns. To claim anything else would be philistinism. The
unfiltered masses of past learning that Google Books is now making widely
accessible can only help to increase our felt distance from the past. What
still remains relevant from this past for us today, however, and what makes
the digitization of our cultural heritage worthwhile are the upheavals and new
beginnings that mark the best moments of our tradition. What we should look
out for when we are browsing the archive of Google Books is no single thought,
but, instead, the willingness to think.
--Martin Wagner
http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=13584
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