Exclusivity

There are some writers who have hated Shakespeare, including some writers I admire such as Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw. Voltaire was another of the Shakespeare haters, and I used to be a great admirer of Voltaire. However, the more Leibniz I read, the model for Voltaire's ridiculous and useless Dr Pangloss, the more difficult it becomes for me to summon any enthusiasm for Voltaire.

I do not share this loathing, but I think I understand it, or at least a major component of it: the attention given to Shakespeare's work is so extraordinarily great that it robs attention from other, worthy authors. 

 

In an episode of "Boardwalk Empire," there is a flashback showing Jimmy Darmody, played by Michael Pitt, in his time at Princeton, reading aloud from -- what?! What was that?! Immediately the viewer could hear that it was a play in English written around the time of Shakespeare, but not Shakespeare, and even if the language of the passage were not so beautiful in its own right, the fact of it not being Shakespeare would've made it interesting, because most of us never hear anything written in English near Shakespeare's time except Shakespeare. To be sure, we hear anecdotes about Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe, but only in connection with Shakespeare, and we never hear a passage read from one of their plays, let alone actually seeing one of their plays from start to finish.

Just that snippet of Webster in "Boardwalk Empire" made me extraordinarily curious. I am no expert on English literature --  I'm more of a dilettante: I have a very weak grasp of a very great many languages -- but I can very easily imagine how someone with a great and detailed knowledge of literature in English, someone like George Bernard Shaw, could have been driven quite deeply and regularly batty by the way that Shakespeare has blinded us to so many interesting writers in or near his time, like the sun hiding many interesting stars from view: Ah, so we're going to discuss an English masterpiece written around 1600? Let me guess: Shakespeare, for the 10,000th time in a row? 

The knowledge that it was going to be Shakespeare for the next 10,000 times as well, at least as far as any broad public was concerned -- yes, I can easily see how that would drive an expert crazy, quite apart from any appraisal of Shakespeare's own merits. 

I know a bit more about Latin literature, where Cicero is not only widely -- very widely -- considered to be the finest writer ever to have written it, often enough by readers who have read little enough Latin written by anyone else. Not only that, and not only that many people consider him the best Latin author to emulate. No, over and above that, for a number of centuries now, a not inconsiderable faction has insisted, with the unbending assurance of the blind art critic, that the ONLY correct way to write Latin is to imitate Cicero.

Even before I ever suspected that anyone had ever insisted such a strange thing, I was tired of Cicero. By volume, about one-fifth of all surviving Classical Latin literature is that written by Cicero. From its beginnings in the 3rd century BC to the end of the Classical era in the 5th century AD when it gave way to the Christian Medieval era, about one-fifth of all that people thought well enough of to hold on to, has been Cicero's rhetorical and philosophical works and his speeches and letters. From the 3rd century BC to the 5th century AD many fine Latin authors survive only in paltry scraps. Hundreds more we know only from the admiring comments contained in the surviving scraps of their contemporaries and colleagues, and who knows how many thoroughly deserving ancient Latin poets, historians, philosophers and others have disappeared so thoroughly that no one even knows their names, all to make more shelf space for, ugh, Cicero? 

I've come to grips with the possibility that I may have always drastically under-estimated Cicero. I'm not here to insult him, nor to insist that he's the last Latin author you should read. I've gained a little more humility than that, at last, and acknowledge that I may have been, and may remain, pretty much blinded in my assessment of Cicero's writings, because of all of those other, relatively neglected authors. 

I AM here to insist, gently but firmly, that Cicero is not the only Classical Latin author worth reading, nor even the only one worth emulating. Latin, just like English and French and other languages, offers a variety of ways to skin a cat.

The attention which Erasmus holds at the expense of his contemporaries may be even more extreme than Shakespeare versus other Renaissance authors in English and Cicero vs other Classical Latin authors. Just as wide swaths of the public, when asked to name as many luxury watch brands as they can, will say, "Rolex... Uhhhmmmm..." so many Latinists, when asked to name some of the finest Latin authors who lived after the Classical period, will reply, "Erasmus... Uhhhmmmm..."

I recall shaking with rage in the stacks of a major US university library, upon seeing that the several very large editions of Erasmus, plus the books about Erasmus, covered several times as much shelf space as the rest of ALL Latin literature past the Classical period: Medieval, Renaissance Latin except Erasmus, more recent Latin... I stood there with my dilettante's weak grasp of those other categories of Latin which I felt worthy of attention, and shook with the outsider's powerless rage. 

I'm less enraged now. Those other categories of Latin, as far as I can tell, have begun to rebound in the amount of attention paid to them. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just that I'm beginning to find the nooks and crannies where they're appreciated. And as far as Erasmus himself is concerned, I've found it impossible to dislike him nearly as much as before I stumbled across his dialogue "Ciceronianus," which pokes fun quite mercilessly at people convinced that the only proper way to speak Latin is to imitate Cicero.

I laughed until I fell off of my chair, and then I lay on the floor shaking with laughter. Laughter may be the best cure for rage over things like this, which aren't actually matters of life and death. 

There are circles in which Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (LLPSI), a Latin-language course by Hans Ørberg, is the favorite course for beginners, and the one most often recommended. 

There are circles in which it is the ONLY Latin course recommended to beginners, and in which those who mention other routes are angrily shouted down. What has been seen cannot be unseen, and just recently I suddenly saw the resemblance between this level of exclusive support for LLPSI, and those who insist that one must imitate Cicero, or who have never read anything written in English between Shakespeare and Swift, or in Latin between Gellius and Erasmus...

"Be angry at the sun for setting," Robinson Jeffers advised those of us who get all worked up over the way things are. "Yours is not theirs," he added. Like many others, I first read that poem because Hunter S Thompson reprinted it in one of his books.  I am not required to feel superior to the others who read it there and did not, like me, go on to read many more of Jeffers' poems. 

There are various forms of exclusivity, and if I am going to be consistent and regret that John Webster and Ausonius and the ENTIRE Carmina Burana and Jeffers' long poem Dear Judas and Leibniz are not more widely read, I must be consistent, and not resent Cicero and Erasmus and Shakespeare and Dr Thompson simply because they are more popular. For one thing, snobs are singularly unpleasant and make very bad advertisers. 

But more importantly, although Shaw may have been right to be exasperated at all the fine authors who go unread, he may have been wrong about Shakespeare. I may have been wrong about Cicero, and, as I have hinted, I'm already beginning to see that I was wrong about Erasmus. Let's not stop trashing Dan Brown. He deserves it. But not everyone who's extremely popular is a bad writer.

Why Latin Should Revive

I am rather excited by various developments which seem to show that Latin may be making a comeback: the Living Latin movement, for example, and some recent publications of Medieval and Neo-Latin texts. It seems possible to me that some momentum may be accumulating.

"Latin is a language without  a country.  It is not the native language of any country.  That is why it is doomed." 

It was a language without a country when the Western Roman Empire fell in AD 476, and for well over a thousand years after that it remained the international language of western Europe. It was not a global language as English is today, and I don't happen to know whether or not the reach of Latin was greater than that of Arabic or Chinese, but within western Europe, it was universal.

 

In European universities, from Finland to Portugal, to Lima, Peru, where St Mark's University was officially established in 1551, lectures were given, discussions were held, and examinations, oral and written, in Latin. Latin was the language of mathematics and physics, of botany, chemistry, geography, medicine. Newton published his Principia, in 1728, in Latin. Spinoza published a few minor early works in Dutch, and then all of his major works were in Latin. 

Descartes and Leibniz each published about half in Latin and half in French. Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes wrote mostly in Latin. Milton wrote in English, Italian, Latin and Greek, the show-off! But these were all 17th- and 18th-century figures, coming at the end of the period of Latin's dominance in Europe. Before the year 1600, although there certainly was a large amount of vernacular literature, exactly none of it could have been considered academic. Latin had no country of its own, that's true, but it did have communities, including the academic community. Students and professors traveled all over Europe and employed the same language wherever they went. It was expected that a professor would teach in several countries over the course of his career, in part to ensure that ideas circulated internationally. 

Latin was the language of royalty and high aristocracy, and of international diplomacy. It was not always expected that every single king and queen could speak brilliantly and spontaneously in Latin, but the advantages of being able to do so were large and obvious.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, military generals, colonels and majors came from the aristocracy, and they traveled internationally, working sometimes for this country, sometimes for another. Although in this case it had less to do with the spread of ideas than with the mercenary officers seeking the most advantageous positions. And all over Europe, battlefield commands were shouted out in Latin.

Latin was the international European language of shipping and commerce. Christopher Columbus did not attend a university, but he did learn Latin, in order to be a ship's captain traveling internationally, and also in order to read works about the Earth's geography which were all either originally written in Latin or translated into Latin from Greek.

So you see, although Latin did not have a country, for over a thousand years it still had some very important uses. And I didn't even mention the Middle Ages, or theology! It may have been no-one's first language -- or very few people's first language -- but it was very many people's second language. The time in which Latin has declined is still a very short time compared to the time when it flourished.

Anyway, when I said yesterday that I was very excited because I thought Latin might be about to make a very big comeback, I was not thinking about it replacing English as the world language numero uno (see what I did there? never mind). I was merely expressing the hope, shared by some others, that Latin may be reviving somewhat from the low point in popularity it has recently reached. At the very least, perhaps more people will resume studying several thousand years' worth of the history of hundreds of millions of people in the language in which it was written.

Newton, Leibniz, Wolff, Mathematics, Leibniz' Reputation and Epistemology

I often think about epistemological subjects: What do we know? What can we know? Why do we think we know what we think we know? In particular, I wonder why some people seem so sure that they know the thoughts, feelings and motivations of others, without believing in telepathy, the notion of which I also reject, pending much stronger evidence than anything I've seen so far. I think about this when I hear about jury verdicts being overturned by things like DNA evidence. I think about it when I hear scientists talking about Newtonhaving invented calculus, and rarely mentioning Leibniz,who claimed that he had invented calculus independently of Newton. During his lifetime and since, this claim of Leibniz' has often been called a lie.

In this earlier Wrong Monkey post, as I waited for this volume of letters between Leibniz and Wolffto arrive from Amazon, I speculated on Christian von Wolff'spossible role in the decline of Latin as an academic vernacular. When the book arrived and I read its introduction by C.I. Gerhardt, it became plain that Gerhardt blamed Wolff for damaging Leibniz' reputation. Indeed, it seems Gerhardt may have gathered these particular letters and published this book for no other reason than to expose Wolff's bad behavior and rehabilitate Leibniz' reputation -- his unjustly tarnished reputation, in Gerhardt's opinion. It is Gerhardt's thesis that Wolff, early in his academic career, was weak in mathematics, too weak to justify the academic positions in mathematics and philosophy which he occupied, and that he basically used Leibniz during this period as an unpaid math tutor, and that after Leibniz' death he claimed many of Leibniz' mathematical achievements as his own and downplayed the help he had received from Leibniz. Gerhardt maintains that this misrepresentation of the facts not only helped Wolff acquire and hold academic posts for which he was gravely underqualified, but that it also gave ammunition to those who maintained that Newton alone had invented calculus and that Leibniz had been lying when he claimed otherwise. Gerhardt maintains that the letters between Wolff and Leibniz which he presents on this volume clearly demonstrate all of this.

Do they? I don't know, in large part because my knowledge of math is not extensive enough to allow me to follow all of the math contained in the letters written in Latin bewteen Wolff and Leibniz and collected in Gerhardt's book. My knowledge of math would've been nowhere near cutting-edge 300 years ago when those letters were new, much less is it cutting-edge now, when all these world-class mathematicians and physicists seem quite dismissive of any notion that anyone but Newton had any part in inventing calculus. Then again, those physicists and mathematicians have almost all been American or British. I haven't heard any present-day German experts weigh in on the Newton-Leibniz controversy. And Gerhardt, who published his volume in 1860 with a thesis of Leibniz having been wronged, by Wolff and also by those who praised Newton at his expense, was German. National sentiments were and are widespread, pervasive and often subtle, much more widespread than the obvious hatreds of extremists fringes. And Newton seems to me to have been the sort apt to fight a bitter feud with or without significant cause, like the one he fought against Leibniz until Leibniz died in 1716, and Leibniz seems like the sort who would not feud without cause, who would be reluctant to fight even with cause, and who would cheerfully admit it when and if some laurels had been bestowed upon him which he had not earned.

But how on Earth do I think I know so much about Newton's and Leibniz' personalities and motivations and about their respective characters? Could it not well be that I am predisposed to like Leibniz and dislike Newton because of some other things each of them wrote which have nothing to do with calculus, so that in this quarrel I am judging Newton too harshly and Leibniz too well? Could it not well be that I too am much too hasty to think that I know this or that? that for instance I am completely unjustified in claiming that national sentiment may have tipped the scales in favor of Newton in the judgment of all those expert mathematicians and physicists?

It could be. Of course I still think I'm right and that I am unusually free of prejudice and unusually attuned to the prejudices of others. But I know I haven't proven anything of the sort. I don't think this essay will change many minds about Newton or Leibniz, or Wolff, or Gerhardt, or math in general. But perhaps it will persuade some readers to ponder more often the nature of things like knowledge and certainty. I think that would be a good thing, although I don't think I can prove that either.

Wolff and Academic Vernaculars

It's been 18 years since the last time I dropped out of graduate school, but a lot of the things I read are similar to things that grad students would read. I've spent a significant portion of my life in university libraries and used-book stores; I did that before I was a university student, and between the periods when I was enrolled in one university or another, and when I was enrolled I spent a lot of time in such places researching a lot of things which did not have to do with the courses I was taking at the time. At the moment I'm waiting for a volume of letters between Leibniz and Wolffto arrive via UPS, a title whose audience, I'm guessing, consists mostly of professional academics; the tracking information indicates it should arrive today.

Latin letters: the German title of the book is Briefwechsel (in lateinischer Sprache), Correspondence (in the Latin Language). I suspect that the subtitle in parentheses may be meant to indicate that Leibniz and Wolff also corresponded in other languages, but the present volume presents only the Latin letters. I ordered the book because of my interest in Leibniz, with Wolff's name ringing only the faintest of bells; after I ordered it I checked the Wikipedia article on Wolff -- Christian von Wolff -- and it says that he was the most eminent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant, and that it was he who introduced the use of German as a language of scholarly instruction and research. (So, it was him! He's the one!) Wolff lived from 1679 to 1754. There was still a lot of German scholarly writing in Latin after him -- see for instance this collection of articles by August Boeckh,written between the 1810's and the 1840's, or the two pieces in Latin written by Nietzsche in the 1860's included in this collection;but both the Boeckh and the Nietzsche are articles having to do with Classical literature, where it's only to be expected that the use of Latin as a vernacular would persist longer than in other fields.

Also, it seems to me, although as yet I have no way at all of proving it, that academic papers and lectures must have been written and read in German at least now and again before Wolff.

Still, I don't see any particular reason to doubt that Wolff at least greatly popularized the use of German and the partial abandonment of Latin in German universities. It seems to me that there must have been some controversy over this; I'm picturing polemics published for and against the use of German in academia. I'm picturing most or all of them written in Latin, on both sides of the question. Reader, you may consider me to be already actively looking for those polemics exchanged between 18th-century academics. I'm on the side that lost, and I'm annoyed with those earlier scholars who lost the cause. I'm picturing pro-Latin polemics full of faulty reasoning, ad hominem attacks, reactionary politics, contempt for the lower classes, and a pronounced lack of charm in general: with some exceptions, a good cause badly argued, and on the other side, very bright and good men, and perhaps even some ladies, holders of salons perhaps, arguing brilliantly and movingly on the wrong side. Cheered on by horses' asses like Rousseau and Paine.

Now the cause of the revival of Latin is a positively Quixotic one, argued by a few weirdos such as myself. I don't think it's impossible that Latin will one day once again be a widespread common language of academia, re-establishing a international, non-nationalistic Latin culture, and not just in Classical studies and related disciplines, either, or even in wider circles than academia; but that's mainly because I think it's logically unsound to make predictions about human behavior using the term "impossible." Even I admit that it's extremely unlikely.