Tag: Goethe

#TBT – A History of White People

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

That time Nell Irvin Painter myth-busted the idea of whiteness and Thomas Emerson made white history. 2010.

 

“Transcendentalism, the American version of German romanticism (a la Kant, Fichte, Goethe, and the Schlegel brothers), flourished in New England, particularly in eastern Massachusetts, from the mid-1830s to the 1840s. German transcendentalism offered an odd mixture, including even a hefty does of Indian mysticism inspired by Friedrich von Schlegel, which Mary Emerson hand also found congenial. In place of established Christian religion (particularly the then prevailing Unitarianism), transcendentalism offered a set of romantic notions about nature, intuition, genius, individualism, the workings of the Spirit, and, especially, the character of religious conviction…

Within this German-driven transcendental swirl, one man, an Englishman, stood tallest: he was Thomas Carlyle (1785-1881)…

Carlyle actually came to think of Goethe as “a kind of spiritual father,” and took upon himself the task of spreading the transcendental gospel. And spread it he did, writing the magazine articles Emerson was reading in the New England…

Emerson was thirty when he first saw Europe. By then he had left his pastorate and lost his beloved young wife to tuberculosis two years after their marriage. Now he poured energy into seeing for himself the luminaries of this new philosophy. Coleridge and Wordsworth came first, and both disappointed Emerson greatly…Even worse was Wordsworth who abused the beloved Goethe and Carlyle and nattered on as though reading aloud from his books…

Much younger than Coleridge and Wordsworth, Carlyle captivated Emerson through a day and night of passionate exchange chock full of fresh ideas ….

Emerson took Carlyle’s novel in hand, shepherding an American edition into print and contributing a preface. With his help, the thumping, clamorous, and obscure style of Sartor Resartus, electrified the Americans becoming known as transcendentalists…

John Ruskin’s estimation of Emerson wavered over time; at one point Ruskin, one of England’s leading intellectuals, considered Emerson ‘only a sort of cobweb over Carlyle.’

This image of Emerson as a watered-down Carlyle-Teutonist never entirely dissipated, just as critics of Carlyle, Emerson, and transcendentalists have harped on the Teutonic opacity of their style…

On the other hand, Americans adored Carlyle’s emphatic writing style and his apparent, if vague, sympathy for ordinary people and a disdain for the elite…

But while their halcyon days may have gone, their influence lived on. Tutored in German race theory reaching back to Winckelmann and Goethe, each had become his country’s national voice, eloquently equating Americans with Britons and Britons with Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon myth of racial superiority now permeated concepts of race in the United States and virtually throughout the English-speaking world. To be American was to be Saxon. ” – Nell Irvin Painter, “The Education of Ralph Waldo Emerson” in The History of White People.

On Faust, Black Magic, and the Singularity:

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

‘It is the theme of black magic through which Goethe’s Faust is linked, in almost a sixteenth-century fashion, with Goethe’s morality of knowledge. What, we may well ask, can black magic mean to Goethe’s sophisticated mind? The black magic of Faust is the poetically fantastic rendering of Goethe’s belief that evil arises from any knowing and doing of man that is in excess of his “being.” Man aspiring to a freedom of the mind fatally beyond the grasp of his “Concrete imagination,” seeking power over life through actions that overreach the reaches of his soul, acquiring a virtuosity inappropriately superior to his “virtue” – this was Goethe’s idea of hubris, his divination of the meaning of black magic. Absolute activity, activity  unrestrained by the condition of humanity, he once said, leads to bankruptcy, and “everything that sets our mind free without giving us mastery over ourselves is pernicious.” He saw something spiritually mischievous, something akin to black magic, in every form of knowledge or technique that “unnaturally” raises mans’ power above the substance of his being. In his Faust black magic almost always works the perverse miracle of such “de-substantiation.” Whether Faust conjures up the very spirit of Nature and Life, the Erdgeist, only to realize in distracted impotence that he cannot endure him; whether the body politic is being corrupted by insubstantial paper assuming the credit that would only be due to substantial gold; whether Homunculus, a synthetic midget of great intellectual alacrity, is produced in the laboratory’s test tube, a brain more splendidly equipped for thinking than the brains that have thought it out: the creature capable of enslaving his creators; or whether Faust begets with Helena, magically called back from her mythological past, the ethereal child Euphorion, who, not made for life on earth, is undone by his yearning for sublimity – throughout the adventures of his Faust, Goethe’s imagination is fascinated, entralled, and terrified by the spectacle of man’s mind rising above the reality of his being and destroying it in such dark transcendence. This, then, is black magic for Goethe: the awful art that cultivates the disparity between knowledge and being, power and substance, virtuosity and character; the abysmal craft bringing forth the machinery of fabrication and destruction that passed understanding.’ – Erich Heller, “Faust’s Damnation” in The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]

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Gabbler Recommends: Les Yeux Sans Visage / Eyes Without a Face

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

Les Yeus Sans Visage – or, The Eyes Without a Face – or, The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus – is perfect for your Halloween-themed viewings this month.

On the film, Susan Sontag has this to say:

‘But in science fiction films, unlike horror films, there is not much horror. Suspense, shocks, surprises are mostly abjured in favor of a steady inexorable plot. Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence—a technological view. Things, objects, machinery play a major role in these films. A greater range of ethical values is embodied in the décor of these films than in the people. Things, rather than the helpless humans, are the locus of values because we experience them, rather than people, as the sources of power. According to science fiction films, man is naked without his artifacts. They stand for different values, they are potent, they are what gets destroyed, and they are the indispensable tools for the repulse of the alien invaders or the repair of the damaged environment.

The science fiction films are strongly moralistic. The standard message is the one about the proper, or humane, uses of science, versus the mad, obsessional use of science. This message the science fiction films share in common with the classic horror films of the 1930’s, like Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Georges Franju’s brilliant Les Yeux Sans Visage [1959], called here The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus, is a more recent example.) In the horror films, we have the mad or obsessed or misguided scientist who pursues his experiments against good advice to the contrary, creates a monster or monsters, and is himself destroyed—often recognizing his folly himself, and dying in the successful effort to destroy his own creation. One science fiction equivalent of this is the scientist, usually a member of a team, who defects to the planetary invaders because “their” science is more advanced than “ours.”

…The message that the scientist is one who releases forces which, if not controlled for good, could destroy man himself seems innocuous enough. One of the oldest images of the scientist is Shakespeare’s Prospero, the over-detached scholar forcibly retired from society to a desert island, only partly in control of the magic forces in which he dabbles. Equally classic is the figure of the scientist as satanist (Dr. Faustus, stories of Poe and Hawthorne). Science is magic, and man has always known that there is black magic as well as white. But it is not enough to remark that contemporary attitudes—as reflected in science fiction films—remain ambivalent, that the scientist is treated both as satanist and savior. The proportions have changed, because of the new context in which the old admiration and fear of the scientist is located. For his sphere of influence is no longer local, himself or his immediate community. It is planetary, cosmic.’

Boldface is mine. Read the rest here.