TAMPERING WITH SCHOLARLY FORMPerl, J. M.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2374794
This editorial note introduces the second of three issues of Common Knowledge dedicated to experiments in scholarly form. The first appeared in Winter 1996 and was introduced by a dialogue between two editorial board members, Greil Marcus and Hugh Kenner, who differed over whether tampering with set scholarly forms should be regarded as a serious business (Marcus) or as a matter of fun (Kenner). Philosophically, this note explains, the journal takes exception to distinctions of the form-versus-content variety — a resistance that stems from desire for peaceful transactions in intellectual life. But though the desire for peace, like any other, can be uncompromising, this one recoils from its own strength and requires indirect expression. One way, it is argued, to achieve indirection is to tamper with forms in which a strong position finds natural expression. Tampering, for instance, with the distinction between narrative history and fiction, or between discursive philosophy and poetry, is a time-honored maneuver. Hence the appearance in this special issue of three pieces (by historians Natalie Zemon Davis, Sir Keith Thomas, and Colin Richmond) on microhistory, along with the first installment of a two-part symposium on “lyric philosophy” and a “pseudepigraphon” premised on its author's conviction that not-for-credit truths are credible only if they appear to be fabrications.
MARTIN LUTHER, MARTIN GUERRE, AND WAYS OF KNOWINGDavis, N. Z.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2373706
Responding to a quip by a fellow historian, who feared that Martin Guerre might become better known than Martin Luther, this guest column, by the author of The Return of Martin Guerre , affirms that they are part of the same universe of historical inquiry. Knowing about Martin Guerre brings understanding of the peasant world, which is also important for the trajectory of Luther's Reformation. Knowing about Martin Luther brings knowledge of major religious change, essential to understanding Martin Guerre's village world and what happened in it. Themes of “imposture” and “dissimulation” and the fashioning of identity are central to social conflicts and social and personal aspiration across the spectrum in the sixteenth century: they are found in the actual lives of both men and in Martin Luther's sermons, as well as in the Martin Guerre trial.
HISTORIANS AND STORYTELLERSThomas, K.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2374826
This guest column comprises both a review of the English translation of Carlo Ginzburg's book Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (2012) and some general comments on the merits and demerits of microhistory as a genre poised between historical writing and fiction. The column is published in the context of two others regarding this latter topic — one by Natalie Zemon Davis, the author of the microhistorical classic The Return of Martin Guerre , and one by Colin Richmond. Davis's column is a response to Keith Thomas's having drawn approving attention to the following remark of J. H. Elliott's: “Something is amiss when the name of Martin Guerre threatens to become better known than that of Martin Luther.” In the present piece, Thomas writes of Ginzburg, a founder of Italian microhistory, that he is more a “European intellectual” than a “mere historian,” the difference being that the former is less interested in history per se than in fields like anthropology, philosophy, and literary theory. Thomas's column expresses doubt about the intellectual restlessness of historians like Ginzburg and about the preparation of microhistorians to write constantly on topics new to them, but it claims as well that Ginzburg's “combination of erudition and piercing intelligence is irresistible.”
DELIBERATION AND PRECIPITATION Fresh Eggs, c. 1890 – c. 1910Richmond, C.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2374835
In an issue of Common Knowledge given over to experiments in scholarly form and to the discussion of them, this piece is one of three on the genre of microhistory. The other two (by Natalie Zemon Davis and Sir Keith Thomas) argue the merits and demerits of the genre, while this piece seeks to exemplify both its virtues and its risks. To show how microhistory offers intense deliberation on a narrowly defined topic, yet also a kind of hastiness — an impatience with demands for broader scope — Colin Richmond examines one limited facet of the relationship between two Americans resident in England at the turn of the last century: the novelist Henry James and the painter Edwin Austin Abbey. Detailed evidence is mustered to document James's love of fresh hens' eggs and of the undignified lengths he would go to obtain them through the agency of Abbey and his wife. This short piece is written as if a parable, and while its moral goes unstated, the reader's attention is drawn to the unsettled question of whether James exerted maximal effort for minimal results, or whether he knew something about the value of freshness undreamed of by those more patient and dignified in pursuing their desires.
WHAT IS LYRIC PHILOSOPHY? An IntroductionZwicky, J.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2374844
These sixty-one numbered paragraphs offer an overview of the idea and practice of lyric philosophy. They draw heavily on the author's texts Lyric Philosophy (1992, 2011), Wisdom & Metaphor (2003), and “Bringhurst's Presocratics: Lyric and Ecology” (1995). The present essay outlines key concepts — clarity as resonance, metaphor as gestalt shift, meaning as gesture, the overlap between philosophy and poetry, the nature of lyric truth — and suggests that they are essential to an adequate epistemology. These concepts allow us to address serious gaps in our understanding of how humans think, gaps that have arisen owing to the limitations of linguified intelligence coupled with a disinclination to admit the existence of these limitations. The overview also describes fundamental differences between lyric philosophy and analytic philosophy, while insisting on a robust conception of truth and on the existence of a knowable mind-independent world. The importance of a lyric approach for our understanding of a range of ecological questions is discussed, and lyric philosophy is positioned, politically, as a critique of technocracy.
IMAGINATION AND THE GOOD LIFEZwicky, J.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2374853
In this essay, part of a cluster of pieces on her concept of “lyric philosophy,” the author explores connections between imagination, understood as the capacity to think in images, and what Wittgenstein called “seeing-as.” In seeing-as, we focus on what Wittgenstein identifies as inner structural relations. This is a term that Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of gestalt philosophical psychology, used independently to describe how seeing-as involves seeing into a thing or situation. The present essay suggests that both seeing-as and seeing-into depend on, and develop, sensitivity to ontological resonance, the attunement of things with one another, the deep analogies that constitute the underlying structure of the world. Imagination is thus fundamental to the good, or ethical, life. For its disciplined exercise relieves us of what Simone Weil calls the “Ring of Gyges”: the refusal to perceive significant analogies between ourselves and other beings, which is the root of injustice.
LADY ORACLE Engagements with Jan Zwicky's Lyric PhilosophyKrajewski, B.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2374862
In this contribution to an exchange of views about “lyric philosophy,” the author argues that the philosopher-poet Jan Zwicky, beginning as early as her dissertation at the University of Toronto, has championed the nonlogical, including the ineffable, the oracular, and the mystical, and that more recently those concerns have merged in a more focused way in her attention to ecological issues. The impulse to fix philosophy and the environment depends in her work mainly on further linguistic statements and declarations, and on occasional overt rejections of traditional political remedies. Thus, the audience for her campaign against analytic philosophy, for example, does not seem to reach beyond the walls of higher education in North America. Zwicky has aligned herself with an esoteric philosophical tradition (Heraclitus, Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger) that has sought to achieve its aims covertly — meaning, for one thing, that it becomes difficult to measure the success of those aims, since they are deliberately meant to be unavailable to public scrutiny. Those aims are not dependent on the general populace's involvement or engagement. Indeed, the author concludes, the general populace has been viewed consistently in the esoteric philosophical tradition as weak and resistant, if not hostile, to philosophical thought.
PERPLEXITY AND PLAUSIBILITY On Philosophy, Lyrical and DiscursiveKoethe, J.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2374871
As part of an exchange of views on what Jan Zwicky calls “lyric philosophy,” this contribution suggests a way of understanding it that brings out affinities between it and the standard discursive model of philosophy with which she is dissatisfied. Good discursive philosophy is based on perplexity and plausibility: on finding that protophilosophical experiences give rise to philosophical puzzlement, and then finding that some ways of responding to such puzzlement are more compelling than others. This philosophical mode involves the same conceptual “gestalt” that Zwicky identifies with lyric philosophy: being struck by how certain combinations of experiences and ideas feel inherently problematic and grasping how certain combinations of ideas that attempt to address these problems hang together while others do not. Moreover, the thought and language in which discursive philosophical reflection is conducted are frequently affective and couched in deeply metaphorical terms. Thus, this essay concludes, the mode of making sense that is supposed to distinguish lyric philosophy from its discursive counterpart is one that is central to the discursive model of philosophy as well.
“NOW I GET IT!” The Dogmatic Assurance of Lyric PhilosophyDavis, C.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2374880
This contribution to a symposium on “lyric philosophy” argues that there is much in Jan Zwicky's work that should make it attractive to literary critics, in particular her insistence that form and content are inextricably bound up with one another. Lyric compositions should not be assessed by reason and logic alone, she holds, and they should not be understood solely in terms of their propositional content. She acknowledges that full understanding employs the imagination and takes account of metaphor. However, some critics may be less willing to accept Zwicky's suggestion that there is a world, and an experience of the world, that is available to us without linguistic mediation and structuring. This article questions whether there a kind of meaning (the “it” of “Now I get it!”) that can be understood preverbally and intuitively. The discussion concludes with a consideration of Zwicky's comments on Rainer Maria Rilke's sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Contrary to her own principles, she offers a prose summary of the poem that does not take account of its lyric form and thereby misses some of its most enigmatic features. Whereas Zwicky would have it that the reader of such a poem can achieve a preverbal intuition of its meaning, the article suggests that, when we attend carefully to the words of the poem, we will be intriguingly perplexed.