THE PURSUIT OF THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH
Asked why people give to beggars but not to philosophers, Diogenes of Sinope said, “Because they think they may one day be lame or blind, but they do not expect to become philosophers.”
— Diogenes Laertius
I. THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF LAUGHTER
In Parts of Animals Aristotle says: “That man alone is affected by tickling is due firstly to the delicacy of his skin, and secondly to his being the only animal that laughs. For to be tickled is to be set in laughter, the laughter being produced by such a motion as mentioned of the region of the armpit.”1 Laughter, in this sense, is a physical action in response to a physical action that induces it. But it is a distinctly human physical response. Laughter as the result of tickling is human but it is not comic.
In the Poetics Aristotle says that Homer was “the first to outline for us the general forms of comedy by producing not a dramatic invective, but a dramatic picture of the ridiculous: his Margites in fact stands in the same relation to our comedies as the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies.”2 The Margites, now believed to be much later than Homer, was a burlesque epic poem with a blundering hero, a buffoon who knew many things, but all of them badly. Such a figure seems generally to fit Aristotle’s characterization of comedy as “an imitation of men worse than the average” who embody the fault of being ridiculous, not simply in the sense of being laughable but of falling within the category of shameful and base (aischros), a species of the ugly, exciting laughter without causing pain.3
Comedy differs from tickling in that what we perceive as comic incites the passions and the body responds with the action of laughter. What we perceive is not admirable or beautiful but conduct worse than the average, that, taken in itself, is undesirable and unseemly, but conduct that is nonetheless human and a part of ourselves. But to reduce the human to the comic is shameful. Plato claims it is inappropriate to make the young into lovers of laughter or for noteworthy human beings or gods to be portrayed as overcome by laughter.4
In the Rhetoric Aristotle says some jests “are becoming to a gentleman, others are not; see that you choose such as become you. Irony better befits a gentleman than buffoonery; the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse other people.”5 It is human to laugh at jokes and jests and to make a joke or a jest of something—to allow our passions to be so affected—but it is shameful to make ourselves into buffoons. Irony is a trope of thought. It is a positioning of the mind in relation to itself or to its object. Irony juxtaposes a meaning against its opposite. It is wit or humor—a kind of thinking not a bodily act of laughing.
Philosophy has always had a particular problem with laughter. Little has been written on it as a problem. Philosophy seems haunted and disturbed by the ghost of Democritus, the laughing philosopher. In late antiquity Democritus was identified with laughter, perhaps because of his doctrine of “cheerfulness,” εύθυμíη, but this does not seem sufficient to account for his reputation as a laugher. Seneca claims it was said that Democritus “never appeared in public without laughing.”6 Democritus found all the foibles of human beings to be laughable.
Laurent Joubert, in his sixteenth-century Treatise on Laughter, goes against the tradition that Democritus’s dedication to laughing at humanity was a defect. He sees in Democritus that the wisest approach to the world is laughter. He says: “Democritus, so perfected in wisdom (as witnessed by Hippocrates) that he alone was able to make all the men in the world wise and prudent, laughed as a rule.”7 He sees Democritus’s laughter as a means to long life in which one is dissatisfied with nothing. Laughter is a kind of prudence for life that allows us to maintain ourselves and to hold the world at a distance. On this view, laughter allows us to attain a kind of moderation necessary for wisdom. In Joubert’s account Democritus appears to be a kind of cynic. But in Traité des causes physiques et morales du rire (1768) Louis Poinsinet de Sivry says that Democritus died with the secret of his mal (ailment).8 We do not know the cause of his laughter. It remains enigmatic.
Philosophers are not supposed to laugh. Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), thought to be one of the greatest scientific minds of his day by such figures as Wieland, Herder, and Goethe, and who founded physiognomy (which became a source for Franz Joseph Gall’s craniology or phrenology), gives us the modern picture of Democritus. Below an engraving of Democritus in Essays on Physiognomy, Lavater gives the inscription: “No; this is not the Democritus before us: it is the image of Democritus the Laugher, who grinn’d and grinn’d at everyone he met. He who laughs continually, and at every thing, is not only a fool, but a wicked wretch; as he who is always crying, and at every thing, is a child, a changeling, or a hypocrite. The face of the perpetual laugher must be degraded together with his mind, and become at length insupportable.”9 Democritus the Laugher cannot even be connected to the historical Democritus, who remains separate and a philosopher in a proper sense. Laughter is an infection of the mind that can only result in its degradation. Any connection between true philosophical thought and laughter is insupportable. The grinning philosopher is unacceptable. The proper mien for the pursuit of truth is not the grin but the grimace.
Lavater’s counter to the face of Democritus is René Descartes, whom he regards as the ideal of the great thinker and with whom he closes his work. His inscription below the drawing of Descartes is: “See how the soul of Descartes is painted in his physiognomy! It would be impossible to analyze each of the features which compose it, but everyone must feel the beautiful and the great in the whole. What can be more animated than these eyes, or more expressive than this nose?”10 On Descartes’s face are literally the contours of truth. His face is the face of truth. Descartes’s (grim) face is the most rare, perfectly thoughtful, and serious face possible. Both laughing and crying call out for a non-Cartesian understanding of our relation to the body. Emotion has no place in the grim approach to truth.
Umberto Eco attacks grimness as a condition of truth in The Name of the Rose, the theme of which concerns the discovery that Jorge, the librarian, has hidden from the world Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy, the second book of the Poetics, in the “greatest library of Christendom.” At the end of the novel, when the abbey and its library burn to the ground as the result of an overturned lamp, Jorge is first seen eating the pages of the lost text on comedy, to keep it from the world, before he and what remains of the text perish in the flames. He hid the book in hopes of hiding laughter from the world because laughter transfers to the body what is proper to the mind. As the library burns, the protagonist, William, says: “Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves to our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh [fare ridere la verità], because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”11 To make truth laugh may be William’s view and not Eco’s as such, but it is a view that deserves consideration. It fits, or at least partially fits, a feature of Eco’s works that is so original and valuable—his constant attention to the incongruities and ironies in human thought, history, and language.
The modern pursuit of truth—the Promethean act in which the work of the gods has been taken over by the human powers to command nature on one’s own terms—has not solved the problem of laughter. William says to Jorge: “The Devil is not the Prince of Matter: the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim [cupo] because he knows where he is going, and, in moving he always returns whence he came.”12 The devil is a man of method. Method always knows where it is going in principle, and it always returns to itself for its next application and solution.
William says that he would like to lead Jorge downstairs “naked, with fowl’s feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a buffoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer. I would like to smear honey all over you and then roll you in feathers, and take you on a leash to fairs, to say to all: He was announcing the truth to you and telling you that the truth has the taste of death, and you believed, not in his words, but in his grimness [tetraggine].”13 William wishes to dress Jorge in the classic symbols of the fool: feathers and the harlequin suit. As Jorge begins to eat the lost text of Aristotle, he laughs for the first time, his mouth stuffed and dripping yellow slime from its dissolving pages.
Truth is the grim face that forbids laughter, the look of rationality that makes us think of “close readings” or arguments, of “decision procedures” or theories, but all that is really there is Jorge: all that is really there is grimness. Tetraggine is a dark humor of the soul (umore tetro), a horrible seriousness that is forbidding, even in its Latin root, foul, offensive. But we have come to sanitize it as the presence of intellectual seriousness. Laughter is a danger to the grim sense of truth because laughter humanizes the object toward which it is directed. The laughing face shows itself to be human. To make truth laugh is intolerable because it connects body and mind. But what is to stop us from so doing? William asks Jorge, at an earlier point, if he thought he could “eliminate laughter by eliminating the book.”14 Jorge replies, “This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even to Prometheus, for canceling fear [la paura].”15
If we move from Jorge’s medievalism of a divine truth that is not to be corrupted by its formulation in terms of Aristotelian philosophy to the modern fixation on method as the key to the pursuit of truth, we bring grimness with us. Grimness is based upon a fear of error. Method is a means whereby we are to sort out truth from error. Truth based on method is a single interpretation of experience, a monotone of thought. There can be no room for the disruption of laughter or irony in the single-minded pursuit of truth. But we can laugh at this single sense of the world. It is like the figure in a comedy who is so intent on one course of action and understanding that all else is missed.
We can step back and laugh at a sense of truth that does not grasp that it is nothing without its constant companion—error. The narrow-mindedness of the pursuit of truth that does not grasp that error always remains as part of truth, that all truths are partial, can never cease taking itself seriously. We can make truth laugh if we pursue truth as a process of opposites such that truth and error are constantly turning themselves into each other, and in so doing we realize that this turning into and returning is the truth about truth.
How might we comprehend these two senses of the pursuit of truth—one that is predicated on the fear of error and can never allow truth to involve the comic, and the other that is predicated on an attraction to error and regards truth as inseparable from the comic? To suggest an answer I wish to take a second look at laughter through the eyes of Giambattista Vico and then to consider two comic pursuits of truth, one by G. W. F. Hegel and the other by James Joyce. Finally, I wish to consider how such pursuits culminate in a sense of truth with a human face, a sense of self-knowledge.
In his remarks in “Pirandello Ridens” Eco says that the problem of the comic has always “caused embarrassment to those philosophers who had tried to define it.”16 He claims that, in pursuing the philosophical definition of the human and the comic, “We start by believing that this experience has at least one physiological manifestation, which is laughter, only to realize that there exist several instances of the Comic that are not accompanied by laughter at all.”17 I think this is correct. It is especially true of two important features of philosophical thinking that involve the comic—irony and the pun. Eco also points out that no philosophers who have written on the comic could be called comic writers themselves. He includes Aristotle in this claim, “who introduces the Comic precisely as a final explication of the Tragic. By a fluke of history, that part of the Poetics which deals with the Comic was lost. Was this a mere accident? At any rate, let me present my own ‘humorous’ hypothesis: as a thinker Aristotle was lucid enough to decide to lose a text in which he had not succeeded in being as lucid as he usually was.”18
Perhaps Aristotle’s implication at the beginning of the Poetics, that it would include a treatment of comedy, should not be taken as evidence that Aristotle ever wrote such an account, or that, if he did, as Eco suggests, he may have realized that it is an impossible topic to explore adequately in philosophical terms, and his text was lost on purpose. But if it was lost, how did it turn up in Jorge’s hands? That is a mystery. One thing is certain: that copy is lost forever, partly eaten by Jorge and the rest consumed in the abbey fire, along with Jorge. The loss of this text is just as much a certainty as the fact that Clark Kent is Superman, as Eco has told us.
II. VICO’S VINDICIAE
It is likely that philosophy cannot tell us what laughter or humor or comedy is. But it can say something about them, and, more importantly, philosophy is enriched by incorporating them in its thinking.
When Vico published his first version of La scienza nuova in October 1725 at Naples, he hoped for recognition not only from Italian scholars but also from the scholarly world of northern Europe. Instead he found an anonymously written, malevolent notice, describing him in false terms as the author and falsifying its contents, published in the August 1727 issue of the Leipzig Acta Eruditorum, perhaps the most prestigious such journal in Europe at the time. Vico was unaware of this false notice until four years later, when, in August 1729, he saw a copy of the issue that had just arrived in a Naples bookstore. Vico is mocked as the author, as the notice claims the “book conceals his name from the learned” but that “we have made certain from a friend” that he is an abbé of the Vico family. The work itself is described as indulging “more in ingenuity, than in truth,” as consisting of a “large shapeless mass” of conjectures that has been received by the Italians themselves “more with tedium than applause.”19
In November 1729 Vico printed a pamphlet in Latin that has come to be called Vici Vindiciae, replying to the fabrications in each phrase of the notice, one after the other, and heading his remarks with an epigraph from Tacitus’s Annals: “whose one dread was that they might seem to comprehend him.”20 The authorship of the false book notice remains unknown. Vico refers to the author as the ignotus erro, the “unknown vagabond,” leading readers to think he may have believed it was Pietro Giannone, who, because his Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples had been banned, was living in exile in Vienna. But more likely the notice was written and sent to the Leipzig Acta by Vico’s colleague and gran tormentatore, Nicola Capasso, in collaboration with some others from the University. Capasso was the source of the unflattering epithet that circulated in Naples, calling Vico “Mastro Tizzicuzzo” because of his tubercular skin-and-bones appearance (tisico = tubercular, an antique slur). Evidence exists that Vico knew that the notice originated in Naples but he may also have wished to implicate his nemico, Giannone.21
In the middle of his pamphlet Vico inserted a “Digression on Human Ingenuity, Acute and Argute Remarks, and Laughter Arising from the Foregoing.” He is concerned to claim that ingenuity (ingenium) is the basis of the proper pursuit of truth, “for philosophers agree with and approve of the popular saying that ingenuity is the divine source of all discoveries.”22 Furthermore, “we learn from philology that ingenuity in rhetoricians cannot exist without truth.”23 It is through our powers of acuity that we discover the connections among things that allow us to uncover the truth that lies hidden in things. Vico cites the Poetics: “This is why, according to Aristotle, we so much like acute remarks, because upon hearing such remarks, our mind, which by its very nature hungers for truth, learns many things in the brief span of a moment.”24 Vico has in mind the famous passage in which Aristotle defines metaphor as giving a thing a name that belongs to something else.25 And, as Aristotle says, this is a sign of genius and cannot be learned from others.
In contrast to acute remarks, which represent the true use of human wit, are argute remarks, which “are the product of a feeble and narrow imagination that either compares mere names of things, regarding only their external appearances (and not all of them), or presents some of them absurdly or unsuitably to an unthinking mind.”26 Argute remarks disorder the fibers of the brain, and this disorder is transferred to all parts of the nervous system, and the body shakes and is transported out of its normal state. Argute remarks do not bring things together, as do acute remarks; instead they make us pay attention to one object at a time, such that each is then expelled from our focus by a subsequent one. This movement makes us like animals that are incapable of acute thought and simply go from perception to perception, and in so doing they are incapable of laughter as well as reason. Serious thought pays attention to one thing at a time. Vico says that “laughing men [ridiculi] are halfway between austere, serious men and the animals.”27
Vico divides laughing men into two types: “cacklers” (risores), who just laugh, and “mockers” (derisores), who make others laugh. He regards mockers as the most remote from serious men and the closest to animals because they corrupt and in fact pervert the very appearance of truth. They turn “that which is” into something else. Vico says: “Gnatho, the parasite in Terence’s play [The Eunuch], speaks of this force when he says: ‘Whatever they say, I praise it; if they say the opposite, I praise that too.’”28
The ignotus erro of the false book notice is not a cackler but a mocker. The laughter of the mocker “stems from deception perpetrated on human ingenuity that hungers for truth, and consequently erupts the more profusely the greater the simulation of truth.”29 Philosophy, Vico claims, aims at overcoming the instability of mind that generates laughter, at least in the sense that it is mockery. Vico regards philosophy as a type of acute thinking based, as mentioned above, on the power of ingenium.
Neither cackling nor mocking laughter fits with William’s proposal to “make truth laugh.” We are left with the possibility of irony. Irony is not a form of laughter in the sense of a bodily act but it is a type of humor. In the second version of La scienza nuova (1730/44) Vico regards irony as one of four tropes that comprise his poetic logic: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. The first three types are to be found in the original myths or fables by which the first humans form their experience. Irony arises with the appearance of reflection: “Irony certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth.”30 When humans thought solely in terms of fables there was no need for the pursuit of truth because fables, like perceptions themselves, are true in and of themselves: “the first fables could not feign anything false; they must therefore have been . . . true narrations.”31
Vico does not advocate returning to the “barbarism of sense,” from which the first fables are formed. But he is suspicious of the trope of irony, the key to philosophical humor, because reflection can turn into its own form of barbarism that can turn men “into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense.”32 Vico sees the barbarism of sense as an honest barbarism in which one could defend oneself or take flight or be on one’s guard, but the barbarism of reflection creates a world in which there is “a base savagery [that] under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates.”33
In this second barbarism human wit is used maliciously to erode the very fabric of social relations, reminiscent of the lowest region of Dante’s Inferno, where there are those who have engaged in treachery against relatives and friends and against guests and hosts. Since the wit exercised in employing the trope of irony engages in a kind of falsehood it can, if unrestrained, become an instrument of malice. What begins as humor can end in deception. Yet Vico’s seriousness does not seem to approach Jorge’s grimness. Vico’s seriousness is not a form of concealment. He invites the reader to prove the new science by following the principle of the Muses. “We make bold to affirm that he who meditates this Science narrates to himself this ideal eternal history so far as he himself makes it for himself by that proof ‘it had, has, and will have to be.’”34 Meditation is narration and this equation is a corrective to the potential for malice that lies within the power of reflection. In this meditative narration, “the reader will experience in his mortal body a divine pleasure as he contemplates in the divine ideas this world of nations in all the extent of its places, times, and varieties.”35 The pursuit of truth is this narration of the whole of the human world as a single but internally diverse story.
Vico’s new science is predicated upon an enormous irony, captured in his famous verum ipsum factum est. What we thought was scientia, the results of the natural sciences, Vico shows was only conscientia, a kind of complicated “witnessing consciousness” of the objects, events, and processes in the world, because the pursuit of truth in the natural sciences is directed to what is, in principle, other than thought. The world of nature is the product of divine making but the objects of the civil world are of our own making. Thus we can make a knowledge of them in the sense of scientia. Since we have made them we can make what is true of them for ourselves, just as what is true in mathematics is true because we make it. Our standard for science must be ourselves, our human nature, not our knowledge of the external world.
Using his verum-factum principle, Vico turns Descartes’s first truth of the cogito into a joke by finding a precise precedent in the character of Sosia in Plautus’s Amphitryo. Sosia encounters a double of himself and becomes uncertain of his own existence but then reassures himself that he is himself by claiming: “But, when I think, indeed I am certain of this, that I am and have always been.”36 I have yet to find this precedent in Plautus mentioned by a Cartesian.
III. HEGEL’S NARRENSCHIFF
In the history of philosophy—at least in the history of modern philosophy, for in ancient philosophy one cannot overlook the cynic Lucian—my candidate for one who can make truth laugh is Hegel. In this view I am at odds with Eco’s judgment in “Pirandello Ridens,” where he lists Hegel among those who have written on the comic but cannot be called comic writers: “another philosopher who was just as austere, boring, and not at all inclined to joke, such as Hegel.”37 As a writer on the comic, Eco, I think, primarily has in mind Hegel’s comments on comedy in his Aesthetics, which are about the comic but not themselves comedic.38 But if we turn to the two main works of Hegel’s system, the Phänomenologie des Geistes and the Wissenschaft der Logik, we find Hegel the Swabian comic. As Hans-Georg Gadamer remarked: “Hegel is a Swabian and shocking people is his passion, as it is the passion of all Swabians.”39
Bertolt Brecht commented on Hegel’s Logic as a work of great humor. He says of Hegel:
He had the stuff of one of the greatest humorists among philosophers; Socrates is the only other one who had a similar method. . . . Eye twinkling was innate to him, so far as I can see, like a birth defect and he had it until death; without being conscious of it he continuously blinked his eyes like someone with St. Vitus’s dance. He had such humor that he could never think of something like order, for example, without disorder. It was clear to him that right next to the greatest order dwells the greatest disorder.40
Of Hegel’s dialectic, Brecht says:
He denied that one equals one, not only because everything that exists passes over ceaselessly and unremittingly into another and indeed into its opposite, but because in general nothing is identical with itself. Like every humorist he was especially interested in what becomes of things. You know the Berlin exclamation: “How you’ve changed, Emil!”. . . . For him concepts were always rocking in a rocking-chair, something that makes a very good impression until it falls over backwards.41
Of Hegel’s book itself Brecht says: “I once read his book, the ‘Larger Logic,’ as I had rheumatism and could not move myself. It is one of the most humorous works in world literature. It deals with the life of concepts, their slippery, unstable, irresponsible existence, how they revile each other and do battle with knives and then sit themselves down together at dinner as if nothing had happened.”42 Furthermore, Brecht says, Hegel’s opposites
appear, so to speak, in pairs; each is married to its opposite and they settle their affairs in pairs, that is, they sign contracts in pairs, enter into legal actions in pairs, contrive raids and burglaries in pairs, write books and give affidavits in pairs, and do so as pairs whose members are completely at odds with each other. What order affirms, disorder, its inseparable partner, opposes at once, in one breath where possible. They can neither live without one another nor with one another.43
Hegel realizes that to grasp experience we must always double up. Experience itself is a matter of doubling up, pairing off. In actuality nothing lives alone. Anything is, even to itself, something else—an other. We know ourselves by being our double. We cannot take ourselves seriously when it means thinking that who we are is simply thus and so, because to claim this we must pair up with the rest of ourselves, that which is not thus and so. Brecht concludes: “I have never met a person without a sense of humor who has understood Hegel’s dialectic.”44
We have become accustomed to regarding reflection as the key to philosophical thought. But reflection is humorless because it cannot account for pairs. Reflection can return from its object to itself but it cannot double up on itself as dialectic can. Hegel says that ancient philosophy was founded on the premise that thought could achieve knowledge of things but “reflective understanding took possession of philosophy [aber der reflektierende Verstand bemächtigte sich der Philosophie].” Hegel holds that in modern philosophy “reflection” has become a slogan (Schlagwort).45
As mentioned above, Vico coins the term “barbarism of reflection” (barbarie della riflessione) to describe the form of thought of the modern world. Vico’s counter to this barbarism, which originates with Descartes and Locke, is the joining of meditation with narration. To meditate (meditare) for Vico is to narrate (narrare). Hegel’s counterpart to Vico’s union of these is the union of the subject and predicate in the “speculative sentence” (speculativer Satz).46 Consciousness finds the meaning of the subject in its predicate but, once at the point of its predicate, consciousness can grasp the meaning of the predicate only by connecting it back to the subject. In circling back to itself, the subject is changed. The predicate has become aufgehoben (sublated) in the subject.
Hegel replaces reflection with speculation. Speculation is a kind of narration, for dialectic is inherently the logic of a story, that is, when dialectic is not the mere oscillation between opposites but when, instead, opposites transform (cancel and transcend) themselves through their confrontation with one another. Reflection is always simply of itself, without compound. Speculation always attempts to see into the inner form of experience.
In a well-known letter to Johann Heinrich Voss (May 1805) Hegel wrote: “Luther made the Bible, you have made Homer speak German—the greatest gift that can be made to a people . . . so I wish to say of my own endeavor, that I wish to attempt to teach philosophy to speak German.”47 Hegel wishes to overcome Kant’s Latinized German, and his philosophical language lesson is the Phenomenology of Spirit, which is an extended series of metaphors, word plays, and ironies, beginning with his characterization of Schelling’s absolute as “the night in which all cows are black.”
The Phenomenology is held together by three puns. The first is Hegel’s pun on das Meinen, in the stage of sense-certainty. Das Meinen ist mein. The sense of this fundamental pun cannot be translated directly into English because it depends upon the fact that to be of the opinion of, to mean in the sense of having an opinion, to opine—“meinen” in German—is close to the possessive of the first person in German, mein. Hegel is also punning on mein as the old genitive singular of ich and on das Mein in the sense of possession, my own property—das Mein und Dein, what is mine and thine. Hegel is playing with the irony of consciousness attempting to possess what it cannot possess, what slips through its hands—the sense particular. This pun generates the comic scene of the animals not having the problem of trying to think particulars, falling to and eating them up.
The second pun comes in the middle of the Phenomenology in the last sentence of the section of Hegel’s criticism of phrenology or, more precisely, craniology. Hegel says that the joining of the mind or Geist with the skull bone is no more than what “nature naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination [Pissen].”48 Hegel’s pun is on Wissen generally and on the final stage of consciousness—das absolute Wissen.
The third pun is in the stage of absolute knowing, where Hegel uses the term Erinnerung four times, in the final paragraph, to explain that the whole Phenomenology, or “science of the experience of consciousness,” is a “gallery of images” (Galerie von Bildern) that is held together by recollection. In the second mention of Erinnerung Hegel hyphenates it as Er-Innerung.49 This hyphenation emphasizes that the process of recollection is “an inwardizing.” But, further, it makes the word itself internally dialectical. The substantive, Erinnerung, has as its corresponding verb erinnern; er is inseparable and generally indicates (i) the beginning of the action, but it can also indicate (ii) the achievement of the aim set by the action. Er in itself is a circle capable of indicating beginning as well as end. Er as hyphenated is a pun on Ur-, which, as a prefix to a noun, indicates origin, source, very old, or primitive. Er has within it a dialectical cycle whereby consciousness constantly comes back upon itself, an original and originating kind of memory.
These three puns are all held together by a pun on Schädellehre (craniology), Hegel’s term for what was later called phrenology, the false doctrine of mind or Geist, and Schädelstätte (Golgotha, the place of the skull), which Hegel uses to describe the nature of absolute knowing at the end of the Phenomenology. In the Golgotha of Geist, the divine or Godhead is left with its own infinity as its companion. Hegel glosses the lines of Schiller’s Die Freundschaft, that “from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude.”50 God’s existence and absolute knowing are described by a final irony. God’s relation to his creation is that of a fellow sufferer. He suffers in the quest to make actual and determinate all the moments within His infinite. Consciousness must live with this final irony.
In making philosophy speak German Hegel has rewritten the first work of German world literature—the Narrenschiff (Ship of fools) of Sebastian Brant.51 The power of the Narr is to make us see that what we have taken for true in high seriousness is just as much a particular type of folly. The fool is a master of world inversion, the principle that Hegel derives in order to arrive at the beginning of self-consciousness—die verkehrte Welt. Hegel takes this term from Ludwig Tieck’s comedy, Die verkehrte Welt, which begins with an epilogue and ends with a prologue, in which the audience is packed with actors and the action moves from reversal to reversal. Each stage of the Phenomenology is a type of philosophical foolishness. Each stage attempts to bring the two moments of consciousness (in itself and for itself) together in a unity. But each stage ends with a recognition that its attempt has been an illusion, a foolishness. Then it engages in a greater foolishness and seizes on another version of the possible union of its two moments. It begins again in a continual act of forgetting.
One of the most amusing stages is that of “Das geistige Tierreich und der Betrug, oder die Sache selbst,” a title that even seems like a title of a comedy: “The spiritual zoo (or menagerie) and humbug or the matter at hand.” This is Hegel’s portrait of academic foolishness in which all are busy with their own projects with no higher truth guiding them. It is a world in which humbuggery reigns, each individual feigning interest in the projects of the others but with actual interest in just his own. Only as absolute knowing in its final moment of Golgotha does consciousness realize the irony of its existence. For Hegel, the True is the Bacchanalian revel at which no one is sober, but as each collapses and drops out the scene is one of transparent, unbroken calm.52
Hegel’s ultimate shock to his reader is that we must live with irony—with the fact, as Brecht points out, that right next to order is always disorder. Hegel’s Arbeit des Negativen, his labor of the negative, which causes consciousness to uncover the illusion within what at each stage it takes for truth, although developed phenomenologically, strikes me as close in principle to what Eco investigates as the “force of falsity” in historical terms. Eco recognizes the interdependence in human experience between truth and falsity. Eco asks: “Is it not possible that a similar force [similar to the force of truth] is displayed also by misunderstanding, whereby we can legitimately speak of a force of the false?”53 We live not simply in terms of the pursuit of truth; at the same time we allow ourselves to be influenced by what is false and to pursue it.
IV. JOYCE’S JOKE
The Danish writer Tom Kristensen asked James Joyce for help in reading Work in Progress—that would become Finnegans Wake. Joyce referred him to Vico. Kristensen asked: “But do you believe in the Scienza Nuova?” Joyce replied: “I don’t believe in any science, but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.” Joyce emphasized his book’s humor, and said: “Now they’re bombing Spain. Isn’t it better to make a great joke instead, as I have done?”54 Terence White Gervais, a visitor to Joyce in Paris, asked him if the book was a blending of literature and music. Joyce replied: “No, it’s pure music.” Gervais then asked whether there were levels of meaning to be explored. Joyce replied: “No, no, it’s meant to make you laugh.”55 He told Jacques Mercanton: “I am only an Irish clown, a great joker at the universe.”56 Joyce signed the letter to his benefactor, Harriet Weaver, accompanying a key to a draft of the first pages of the Wake: “Jeems Jokes.”57
As the ballad of Tim Finnegan says: “Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake.”58 Speaking to one of his drinking companions, Joyce corrected “In vino veritas” to “In risu veritas.”59 Nora complained not only of Joyce’s drinking but that he sat up late at night writing, and laughing to himself.
To make truth laugh the philosopher must turn to the poet. Poetry, as Hegel says, must be the instructress of humanity (die Lehrerin der Menschheit). We must seek a mythology of reason (eine Mythologie der Vernunft). “The philosopher must have as much aesthetic power as the poet. Men without aesthetic sense are our literal-minded philosophers [unsere Buchstabenphilosophen].”60 The philosophers must go to school with the poets in order to find the divine comedy of reason. The philosopher must go to school with the poets, first, in order to grasp the power of metaphor, which will release the philosopher from the tendency of literal-mindedness. Once released from the grimness of the literal pursuit of truth, the philosopher can entertain the possibilities of the comic—through the power of irony and the pun. In our time there is no better teacher of these tropes than Joyce. In The Open Work Eco writes:
The defender of contemporary art could reply that when a work of art expresses certain ideas about the world, or man, or the relationship between the two in the way in which it is constructed, it always does so in a “total” sense, as if the work, or the structural model the work realizes, were a compendium of reality (as seen, for instance, in Finnegans Wake), whereas both science and philosophy (at least non-metaphysical philosophy) seem to proceed in terms of partial definitions, allowing us only a temporary knowledge of separate aspects of reality—since they cannot afford to give us a comprehensive synthesis, or they would become works of imagination and move into the realm of art.61
I much agree with this view of the restrictions inherent in science and nonmetaphysical philosophy. The partial always tends toward the thought of literal-mindedness. Metaphysical philosophy must aim at Cicero’s famous definition of wisdom as a knowledge of things divine and human. Metaphysical philosophy, properly pursued, follows Hegel’s dictum: “The True is the whole,” and, as Vico says: “The whole is really the flower of wisdom.”62 The pursuit of truth that takes the whole as its object joins reason to imagination.
To write a big book that takes the whole as its object it is useful to base it on another big book. Joyce does this with Ulysses and he does it with Finnegans Wake—he bases it on Vico’s La scienza nuova. But, as Joyce said, with Ulysses the ports of call were already established. To Padraic Colum he said: “Of course, I don’t take Vico’s speculations literally; I use his cycles as a trellis.”63 Etymologically, “trellis” is a fabric of coarse weave, but specifically trilicius (Vulgar Latin) is “woven with triple thread.” “Trellis” has the notion of three (tres) in it—Vico’s three ages.
Eco warns that we should not regard Finnegans Wake as simply the transposition of Vico’s science into different terms. “Joyce’s statements about his use of La Scienza Nuova should make us cautious. In Finnegans Wake we witness only the imaginative counterthrusts of cultural facts: we do not have a translation but a paraphrase. Since it is not the paraphrase of one conceptual system alone but of many disconnected and often mutually contradictory systems, its suggestions cannot be synthesized into a unitary cultural model.”64 As we know, there are many books at the Wake and there is also a great census of figures within it. Vico is a kind of constant companion—Shaun the postman to Joyce’s Shem the penman—passing through the night world of the Wake. We turn a corner and there is Vico, appearing through some play on his name or thought, helping Joyce deliver his jokes. We encounter Vico and his cycles immediately on beginning the book: “by a commodius vicus of recirculation.”65 The Vico road goes round and round, circling like the water in the commode.
But as I am writing this in Atlanta I also encounter myself near Dublin, Georgia, on the Oconee River in Laurens County. I can experience “the choicest and the cheapest from Atlanta to Oconee.”66 And I can report that the “Laurens County’s gorgios” have been still “doublin their mumper,” as there is now an East Dublin across the Oconee from Dublin. And as we turn one of the last corners of the Wake, about a dozen pages from the end, we encounter a summary of Vico’s doctrine in “Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer.”67 Joyce all along modifies Vico’s three ages of ideal eternal history into four, adding to Vico’s gods, heroes, and men a fourth, or Providence, an age in which the cycle disintegrates. In the vicociclometer these become known as “eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can”—eggburial incorporating the third of Vico’s three principles of humanity, religion, marriage, and burial, and eggburst and eggblend perhaps parallel to the first and second principles.
As a book of wisdom the Wake is about the whole, but it is not a whole in the sense of a unitary cultural model, as, to my mind, Eco correctly points out. If anything holds the Wake together it may be Joyce’s substitution of coincidence for causality or, even more, it is a work of “cocoincidences.”68 As the custodian of human knowledge and history, Joyce is “the double-joynted janitor.”69 His truth is always a “twone.”70 Coincidences are always cyclic, as they repeat something that has somehow been realized prior to their occurrence. The encountering of coincidence in human experience and affairs is usually surprising. It is a break in the normal course of events.
But coincidence is the stuff of literature and narrative, especially drama and comedy. It is also the order of dreams. Henri Bergson says: “Comic absurdity is of the same nature as that of dreams.”71 In the dream the self experiences what logic will not allow. The Wake is, in fact, a dream come true because by “putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at.”72 The dream can put two and two together and let us experience a “twofold truth.”73 The Wake provides us with “A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall memorise.”74
What caught Joyce’s attention in Vico, even more than thunder, cycles, or Providence, was this line in the Scienza nuova: “La memoria è la stessa che la fantasia” (“memory is the same as imagination”).75 This echoes Aristotle’s claim that “if asked, of which among the parts of the soul memory is a function, we reply: manifestly of that part to which imagination [phantasia] also appertains; and all objects of which there is imagination are in themselves objects of memory.”76
Vico’s formulation involves the unique sense of imagination as fantasia—a primordial power through which the original truths or universali fantastici (imaginative universals) are made. These universals are retained in memory as fables and are the archetypes out of which all else is made in thought and action. To imagine is to remember, in varying forms, these poetic universals. They are the common mental language through which coincidences occur and which circulate freely in dreams. They are Joyce’s “imaginable itinerary through the particular universal.”77
In addition to Joyce one other literary figure who has invoked Vico’s notion of cyclic memory is Jorge Luis Borges, in one of his writings, “The Immortal.”78 This fiction has an epigraph from Francis Bacon (one of Vico’s “four authors” whom he vowed always to have before him when meditating and writing).79 “Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.”80 Within the workings of memory, coincidence is repetition. There can be no novelty. In Bacon the sentence that follows where the epigraph leaves off is: “Whereby you may see that the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below.”81
The theme that runs through “The Immortal” is Homer. Vico’s equation of memory and imagination occurs in his section of “Philosophical Proofs for the Discovery of the True Homer.” The true Homer is not only the Greek people themselves, as Vico held; he is repeated throughout history. Borges’s narrator says: “In 1729 or thereabouts, I discussed the origin of that poem with a professor of rhetoric whose name, I believe, was Giambattista; his arguments struck me as irrefutable.”82
There is no novelty and there is no ordo in the sense of a hierarchy of being or events. In the dream of the Wake it is always “The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be.”83 Vico’s ordo is the ricordo in every self. But remembrance is always connected with its opposite: forgetting. Novelty is what is not remembered. The poet Giuseppe Ungaretti tells us, with complete clarity: “Tutto, tutto, tutto è memoria” (“Everything, everything, everything is memory”).84
The French critic Louis Gillet wrote: “Of course, it is no longer a question of Time and Space in this indivisible duration where the absolute reigns. These two comrades, who did their cooking for so long on the scrap-iron stove of Kantian categories, find their pot knocked over by a kick from James Joyce. Their soup is spilled out—chronology disappears and all centuries are contemporary.”85 In Ulysses Stephen remarks: “Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”86 Or, as the Wake puts it: “As who has come returns.”87
Joyce’s method is itself coincidence. As he once told Mercanton: “Chance furnishes me with what I need. I’m like a man who stumbles: my foot strikes something. I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.”88 Joyce’s truth is provided by chance—juxtaposition, coincidence—the logic of the dream, the joke.
V. THE TRUTH OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE
In the Philebus Socrates says that the ridiculous (γέλοιος) is a kind of vice, the opposite of which is the condition of the soul captured in the Delphic inscription “Know thyself.” The opposite of the inscription would be not to know oneself. The person who does not know himself makes himself ridiculous, the cause of laughter. He may do this by thinking himself to be richer than he is or by thinking himself to be more handsome than he is. But the greatest number of people err by thinking they are wiser than they really are. Of all the virtues wisdom is the one that most people claim to possess, and since they do not truly possess it, they are led into all sorts of strife-filled situations. They make themselves ridiculous.89
In the Phaedrus Socrates is asked by Phaedrus if he believes a certain legend about the abduction of Orithuta by Boreas is true. Socrates replies that he could join other intellectuals in offering a more rational and plausible account of the events that the legend portrays, but to do so takes a great deal of time and effort. Socrates says: “But I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous [γέλοιος] to look into other things before I have understood that. This is why I do not concern myself with them. I accept what is generally believed, and, as I was just saying, I look not into them but into my own self.”90 Socrates then wonders whether he is a monstrous beast, more terrible than Typhon, or whether he is a tamer animal with a divine, gentle nature. Socrates’s question goes unanswered, perhaps implying that he is some of both, an ironic and paradoxical being—two animals in one.
In the Phaedo Socrates promotes the claim that those who philosophize rightly are practicing to die and that anyone would be a fool to pass happily into death unless it can be proved that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body. Socrates’s arguments with Simmias and Cebes about the soul are inconclusive. At the end of the dialogue, as Socrates passes into the silence of death, he uncovers his face, saying to Crito: “We owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget.” Crito replies that it shall be done and asks “if there is anything else.” Socrates makes no reply.91 The traditional interpretation of this passage is that, since Asclepius is the god of healing, Socrates may be saying that death is a cure for life. This may be true; but the cock—feathers and beak—is an archetype of human consciousness, and the sign of the fool throughout all literature.
Is it a joke? Crito, the decent, good, conventional, well-meaning follower of Socrates, does not get it and he asks if there is anything else. Socrates, having engaged in arguments in his last hours, even saying never to be an enemy of argument, offers a final assertion that logic cannot understand. As a master of metaphor and irony, he offers a joke. Is Socrates the sacrifice, the cock that has the power to open the day? Is death just another cure to be overseen by Asclepius? With a wink, Socrates’s soul is at peace. Although the cock is a characteristic sacrifice to Asclepius, could Socrates’s choice to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius also be a reference to Aristophanes’s use of a cock as an example, in The Clouds, in his spoof of Socrates’s lesson to Strapsiades on profound speaking?92
The laugh releases energies of consciousness that go back to the origin of consciousness, to its primordial scene of light and darkness. As the cock, with its crow, breaks the light of day, the laugh is a reaffirmation of beginning. The comic can connect life and death as the cock connects night and morning. Socrates dies at the end of the day, which is the beginning of the new day. Socrates’s joke is unforgettable; its image is impressed into memory, “mememormee!”93
Ernst Cassirer begins An Essay on Man with the claim: “That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry appears to be generally acknowledged. To all the conflicts between the different philosophical schools this objective remained invariable and unshaken: it proved to be the Archimedean point, the fixed and immovable center, of all thought.”94 For Cassirer, as for Alexander Pope: “Know then thy self, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is man.”95 For Cassirer, the master key to the study of man is the symbol. Man is the animal symbolicum. Mankind makes itself in the symbolic forms of culture; thus man can know himself by knowing his Werk. As Vico says, the dictum “Know thyself,” attributed to Solon, is “a great counsel respecting metaphysical and moral things.”96 Philosophy, for Vico as for Cassirer and Hegel, is anthropological.
A glaring exception, in contemporary philosophy, to Cassirer’s claim that self-knowledge is the Archimedean point of all philosophical thought, is the phenomenology and fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger bypasses both Solon and Socrates in Greek philosophy. He is not the philosopher of self-knowledge. Heidegger is the philosopher of Angst, Sorge, Geworfenheit, and Tod. He does not take Pope’s advice; he presumes Being to scan and he assigns the study of Mankind to the specific cultural sciences and not to his philosophy. He insists, as he did to Cassirer at their meeting at Davos, that his philosophy was not an anthropology.97 I have searched Heidegger’s writings and enlisted others in my search, and we have failed to find any laughs, jokes, ironies, or comedy. If they are there they are well hidden and able to resist all my interrogations. I am led to regard Heidegger as my candidate for the modern philosopher of grimness. Behind his words is a constant umore tetro, a darkness of spirit that looks away from the human comedy.
Cassirer paraphrases Fichte’s famous equation of the nature of a philosophy with its author: “The kind of philosophy a man chooses depends upon the kind of man he is. For a philosophic system is no piece of dead furniture one can acquire or discard at will. It is animated with the spirit of the man who possesses it.”98 So far as I can see, Heideggerianism is a humorless philosophy. Even Descartes, who regards laughter as only tangentially connected to joy, and who holds that in laughter “there is always some slight occasion for hatred, or at least for wonder,” sees himself ironically.99 As he entered in his private notebooks: “Just as comedians are warned not to allow shame to appear on their brows, and thus put on a mask: so I, about to step upon the theater of the world, where I have so far been a spectator, come forward in a mask.”100 In the third part of the Discourse Descartes says that in the nine years he roamed the world he attempted “to be a spectator rather than an actor in all the comedies that are played out there.”101 Heidegger looks at the world and never smiles. The world is not a theater for him.
Ernesto Grassi, the philosopher and Renaissance scholar who was for many years a close associate of Heidegger, relates an episode with Heidegger, which, as Grassi says, “is revealing of his character.”102 Grassi went to visit Heidegger one evening, after Heidegger had fallen out with the National Socialists and had resigned his university rectorship. Grassi asked him how he was. Heidegger replied: “Bad.” Heidegger had been removed as a member of the advisory committee of the Nietzsche archive. Grassi ironically pointed out that he was in good company because other quite distinguished figures had also been removed. To this remark Grassi records Heidegger’s verbatim response: “No, matters are not so simple. Because of what has happened I have taken revenge on posterity.” Grassi asked what this meant—to have taken revenge on posterity. Heidegger replied: “Today I have destroyed a new arrangement of Nietzsche’s Will to Power which contradicts the one made by his sister Elisabeth Förster and on which I have worked for a long time.”103 Grassi’s printed version differs in detail, regarding how Heidegger had taken revenge on posterity, from how he once related it to me in conversation. Grassi said to me that, as he came upon Heidegger, he was seated by a stove and burning the pages of his manuscript, one by one. He was not eating them like Jorge but he shares in Jorge’s fanaticism. And as with Jorge, if we believe, we believe not so much in the words of Heidegger’s philosophy as in the grimness that supports them.
Concerning Heidegger’s fixation with death, Cassirer says: “this might be a very ancient way of thinking, this might be found by some to be very heathen, but it is the truly philosophical solution, which takes death itself up among the realm of necessity, and through this thought of necessity, through amor fati, it is able to liberate us from anxiety about death [Todesangst]. And with this life itself is raised above the realm of mere ‘care’ [Sorge, anguish, apprehension] (Heidegger).”104 Of the grimness of Geworfenheit, Cassirer observed that, for Heidegger: “To be thrown into the stream of time is a fundamental and inalterable feature of our human situation. We cannot emerge from this stream and we cannot change its course. We have to accept the historical conditions of our existence. We can try to understand and to interpret them; but we cannot change them.”105 We cannot laugh at ourselves either; our situation is in Heideggerian sensibility perpetually dead serious. For those seeking authentic existence there is no fun to be had at Finnegan’s wake.
The distinction between Sein and Seiende is at the center of Heidegger’s philosophy. But Eco asks, in his chapter “On Being” in Kant and the Platypus, what if Heidegger had been born in Oklahoma and did not speak or think in German? Eco writes: “It is hard to separate Heidegger’s thought from the language in which he expresses himself, and he was well aware of this: proud as he was of the philosophical nature of his German, what would he have thought had he been born in Oklahoma, with an extremely vague to be and a single Being for Seiende and Sein?”106 Heidegger in Oklahoma is an image only Eco, with his sense of the human and the connection of thought to language, can give us. Heidegger—near an oil rig, perhaps in Western wear, or dining at the Cattlemen’s Steakhouse at Stockyards City in Oklahoma City. What a relief, to have the possibilities of the human intrude on ontology! Eco goes on to show how what Being is, for us, is tied to how we are able to speak about it. One is reminded of Joyce’s line: “Are we speachin d’anglas landadge or are you sprakin sea Djoytsch?”107
Eco writes: “One can only agree with Heidegger: the problem of being is posed only to those thrown into Being-there, into the Dasein, of which our disposition both to notice that something is there and to talk about it is a part. And in our Being-there we have the fundamental experience of a Limit that language can say in advance (and therefore only predict), in one way only, beyond which it fades into silence: it is the experience of Death.”108 Eco’s answer is to turn to the poets, whom he says are “liars by vocation . . . because for them tortoises can fly, and there can even be creatures that elude death.”109 The language of the poets can resist the limits of our Dasein and take us into a realm of freedom. Eco concludes: “What the Poets are really saying to us is that we need to encounter being with gaiety (and hopefully with science too), to question it, test its resistances, grasp its openings and its hints, which are never too explicit. The rest is conjecture.”110 Heidegger has his poets and has even been accused of reducing philosophy to poetry. But he would have the poets go to school with him. They are to be a confirmation of his ontology, not a source for it.
It is the poets that can make truth laugh, for they are inspired by the Muses, who sing both true and false songs but can sing true songs when they will. The philosophers are the children of Chronos, from which derives their natural melancholy. But this melancholy, which is a dark humor, must be balanced by a sense of the ridiculous, of how close truth is to its opposite, how much the being of anything is tied to what it is not, which offers us the beginning of self-knowledge.
DONALD PHILLIP VERENE
EMORY UNIVERSITY
JANUARY 2011
NOTES
1. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:1049 (673a4–10).
2. Aristotle, Poetics, in Barnes, ed., Complete Works of Aristotle, 2:2318 (1448b34–1449a1).
3. Ibid., 2:2319 (1449a31–35).
4. Plato, Republic, in John Cooper, ed., Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1025–26 (388D–389A); cf. Plato, Laws, in ibid., 1414 (732C) and 1587 (935B).
5. Aristotle, Rhetoric, in Barnes, ed., Complete Works of Aristotle, 2:2268 (1419b8–9).
6. Seneca, “De ira,” in John W. Basore, trans., Moral Essays, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 187.
7. Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 17.
8. Louis Poinsinet de Sivry, Traité des causes physiques et morales du rire relativement à l’art de l’exciter, ed. William Brooks (Exeter: Exeter University Publications, 1986), 26.
9. Johann Kaspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1792), 1:59.
10. Ibid., 3:251.
11. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1983), 491; Il nome della rosa (Milan: Bompiani, 1980), 494. See Donald Phillip Verene, “Philosophical Laughter: Vichian Remarks on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose,” New Vico Studies 2 (1984): 75–81.
12. Eco, The Name of the Rose, 477; Il nome della rosa, 481.
13. Eco, The Name of the Rose, 477.
14. Ibid., 473, 477.
15. Ibid., 475, 478.
16. Umberto Eco, “Pirandello Ridens,” in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 163.
17. Ibid., 164.
18. Ibid.
19. Giambattista Vico, “Vindication of Vico,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene, eds., Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science: Translations, Commentaries, and Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 109.
20. Tacitus, Annals, trans. John Jackson, in Tacitus, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 267 (1.11).
21. Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s Reply to the False Book Notice: The Vici Vindiciae,” in Bayer and Verene, eds., Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science, 90–91.
22. Vico, “Vindication of Vico,” 116.
23. Ibid., 118.
24. Ibid.
25. Aristotle, Poetics, 2:2332–33 (1457b 6–32).
26. Vico, “Vindication of Vico,” 118.
27. Ibid., 119.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 120.
30. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), §408.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., §1106.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., §349.
35. Ibid., §345.
36. See Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, trans. L. M. Palmer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), ch. 1. The line is: “Sed quom cogito, equidem certo sum ac semper fui.” Plautus’s text is “sed cum cogito” instead of Vico’s “sed quom cogito.” See Plautus, Amphitryo, 447 (my translation). On verum-factum, see also Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, §349.
37. Eco, “Pirandello Ridens,” in The Limits of Interpretation, 164.
38. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 2:1192–1237.
39. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die verkehrte Welt,” Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 3 (1966): 137 (my translation).
40. Bertolt Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche (Berlin and Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1961), 108 (my translation). Brecht’s work was written in Finland in 1941 and published posthumously.
41. Ibid., 109. Brecht may have in mind the following ironic remark, made on visiting the gravesite of a friend and finding a large flower growing from it: “My, how you’ve changed, my friend!” This can be found in a folk poem in Berlin dialect, entitled “Die Seelenwanderung” (The transmigration of souls) that is an exchange between “Zwei kleine Knaben, Fritz und Karl/zwei richtige berlinger Jungen.” The last lines of this poem are:
Da liegste nu uff grüner Au
von grünem Rasen zart umrändert.
Und ick denk wehmutsvoll und still:
Mensch Karl, wie haste Dir verändert.
42. Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche, 109.
43. Ibid., 110.
44. Ibid., 111.
45. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 45.
46. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §61.
47. Johannes Hoffmeister, ed., Briefe von und an Hegel, 4 vols. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952–1960), 1:99–100 (my translation).
48. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §346.
49. Ibid., §808.
50. Ibid.
51. Sebastian Brant, Narrenschiff, ed. Friedrich Zarncke (Hildesheim: Olms, 1961); Brant, The Ship of Fools, trans. Edwin H. Zeydel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944).
52. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §47.
53. Umberto Eco, “The Force of Falsity,” in Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, 1998), 2.
54. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 693.
55. Ibid., 703.
56. Ibid.
57. Richard Ellmann, ed., Selected Letters of James Joyce (New York: Viking, 1975), 316.
58. Ellmann, James Joyce, 715.
59. Ibid., 703.
60. G. W. F. Hegel, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” in Werke: Frühe Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), 234–36 (my translation).
61. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 175.
62. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §20. Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 77.
63. Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968), 82.
64. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. Ellen Esrock (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 76.
65. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber, 1939), 3.2.
66. Ibid., 140.35.
67. Ibid., 614.27.
68. Ibid., 597.1.
69. Ibid., 27.2–3.
70. Ibid., 3.12.
71. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: MacMillan, 1911), 186.
72. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 169.8–10.
73. Ibid., 490.16.
74. Ibid., 280.1–2.
75. Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, §819; see also §699. See Ellmann, James Joyce, 661n.
76. Aristotle, “On Memory,” in Barnes, ed., Complete Works of Aristotle, 1:715 (450a20–25).
77. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 260.R3.
78. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 183–95. See especially 194n.
79. Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 139.
80. Borges, “The Immortal,” 183. See also Eccles. 1:9–11.
81. Francis Bacon, “Of Vicissitude of Things,” in The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 451.
82. Borges, “The Immortal,” 193. See Borges’s comments on “The Immortal” in his Norton Lectures, This Craft of Verse, ed. Calin-Andrei Mihailescu (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 112–13.
83. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 215.23–24.
84. Ungaretti in a lecture on Vico in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1937. See Giuseppe Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo: Saggi e interventi (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), 345.
85. Louis Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, trans. Georges Markow-Totevy (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1958), 66.
86. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1993), 175.1042–46.
87. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 382.28.
88. Ellmann, James Joyce, 661. Mercanton records this remark in Jacques Mercanton, Les Heures de James Joyce (Lausanne, 1967), 24.
89. Plato, Philebus, in Cooper, ed., Complete Works, 438 (48C–49A).
90. Plato, Phaedrus, in Cooper, ed., Complete Works, 510 (229E–230A).
91. Plato, Phaedo, in Cooper, ed., Complete Works, 100 (118A).
92. Aristophanes, The Clouds, trans. Jeffrey Henderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 97 (660–65); cf. 125 (845–55). The same word is used by Socrates and Aristophanes—alektruōn.
93. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 628.14.
94. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 1.
95. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle 2, line 1.
96. Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, §416.
97. See Donald Phillip Verene, ed., Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 32–42. See also Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), esp. ch. 4.
98. Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, trans. J. Gutmann, P. O. Kristeller, and J. H. Randall (New York: Harper, 1963), 2.
99. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 372.
100. René Descartes, Cogitationes privatae, in C. Adam and P. Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 1897–1910), 10:213 (my translation).
101. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 1:125.
102. Ernesto Grassi, Renaissance Humanism: Studies in Philosophy and Poetics (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1988), xvi.
103. Ibid. On my friendship with Grassi see Donald Phillip Verene, “Grassi in America,” in Emílio Hidalgo-Serna and Massimo Marassi, eds., Studi in memoria di Ernesto Grassi, 2 vols. (Naples: La Città del Sole, 1996), 1:289–303. It is noteworthy that there is no Library of Living Philosophers volume on Heidegger. When I visited Paul Schilpp in 1975 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, I asked him why there had been no such volume. He replied that he had made a trip to Germany to discuss this possibility personally with Heidegger. They met for an afternoon and had a congenial conversation, but Heidegger politely but firmly rejected his invitation. I asked Schilpp if Heidegger had given any reason for his rejection. Schilpp said no, but asked if I could guess why. I believed the reason to be twofold: the volume would have the character of an American project and would be in English, not one of Heidegger’s geistige Sprachen (Greek and German), and it would require Heidegger to subject himself and his ideas to pluralistic, critical exchange with others, whereas his philosophy aims at direct and profound acceptance by others. Schilpp said that those were exactly his own conclusions.
104. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, ed. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene, trans. John Michael Krois (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 208.
105. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 293.
106. Umberto Eco, “On Being,” in Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, trans. Alastair McEwen (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 2000), 27.
107. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 485.12–13.
108. Eco, “On Being,” in Kant and the Platypus, 50–51.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid., 56. In a small addition to the Scienza nuova, titled “Riprensione delle metafisiche di Renato delle Carte, di Benedetto Spinosa e Giovanni Locke,” Vico says: “the metaphysics of the philosophers must agree with the metaphysic of the poets . . . the learned must not admit any truth in metaphysic that does not begin from true Being [l’Ente].” See Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s ‘Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke,’” in Bayer and Verene, eds., Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science, 179–80.