Since this book ranges widely in its topics and cultural references, the secondary works cited here represent only a small portion of the relevant bibliography. For the most part I cite articles and books that were directly pertinent, useful, or inspiring to me during the course of my research, as well as others I feel might be useful for the reader to consult. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the chapters and notes are mine.
Chapter One: Anthropos
The Intriguing Phenomenon of Age
The term flatus vocis was first introduced into philosophy and theology by the nominalist Roscelin de Compiègne (ca. 1050–ca. 1125), who held that the “universals” are mere sounds, without any substantial reality beyond the breath of the voice that names them. To be clear: I am not claiming that time is a universal or abstract object, rather that time’s “reality” is bound to the age of phenomena. I would also like to clarify the following: when I speak of the age of the universe or the age of civilizations, I am not merely applying a biological metaphor to nonorganic phenomena. Aging is not the prerogative of organisms. It is the flesh of time itself. Therefore—and this is crucial for the cultural history I pursue in this book—I do not share the hesitations of those who think the term “historical age” is a misleading figure of speech. If one believes, as I do, that even the biology of aging is affected by history, then history and age are linked by more than mere analogy. We age differently today than our ancestors did in the past, for we belong to a different age than they did; that is to say, we are of a different age than they were at our age, thanks to historical or cultural factors that distinguish our worlds from theirs.
Henri Bergson’s theory of duration had the potential to become a compelling philosophy of age, yet the five pages that Bergson devotes to the aging process at the beginning of Creative Evolution (10–15) do little to fulfill that potential. In these pages Bergson understands age as the persistence of the past in the present—a crucial aspect of age, to be sure—yet he limits himself to reflecting on the “organic memory” that informs the aging process. His primary concern is to differentiate the vitality of living organisms from artificial systems (which he also calls “unorganized matter”). Unlike the latter, organisms carry “time” within their bodies. In his words, “The evolution of the living being, like that of the embryo, implies a continual recording of duration, a persistence of the past in the present, and so an appearance, at least, of organic memory” (13). From the perspective I adopt in this book, I find it altogether disappointing that Bergson contents himself with so little, that he is happy merely to insist that “real duration” amounts to “a hyphen, a connection link,” or what he also calls “continuity of change.” In sum, one cannot call Bergson’s theory of duration a veritable philosophy of age. At the most—yet even this is doubtful—it contains the seeds of such a philosophy.
For Bergson’s thinking about duration and organic form, see the first chapter of Creative Evolution, “The Evolution of Life—Mechanism and Teleology” (1–63). See also his Duration and Simultaneity (especially chapter 3, “Concerning the Nature of Time”), also included in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Mullarkey (205–22).
For a recent book on Bergson’s philosophy of time, see Keith Ansell-Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (esp. 9–43). See also Suzanne Guerlac’s excellent volume Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Frédéric Worms, arguably the foremost French-language Bergson scholar, has authored many studies on the French philosopher and his work. I found especially helpful his book Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie.
Heidegger speaks in many places about historical ages, for example in his classic essay “The Age of the World Picture,” yet he had next to nothing to say about age as such. His most explicit comments on the topic—pronounced mostly on the occasion of his and some of his friends’ sixtieth birthdays—were mostly undeveloped. Thus in 1949, when Heidegger turned sixty, he wrote in a letter, “Now it gets serious. Or is 60 only a number, the sign for something with which we calculate? Unconnected with the number, however, is the transition into the age [das Alter].” In another letter from the same year he wrote, “The age that begins with sixty years is the autumn of life. Autumn is the filled, settled [ausgeglichene], and therefore balancing season [ausgleichende Zeit].” Heidegger’s commentator Andrew Mitchell, to whom I owe these references, is far more interesting than Heidegger himself when, in the introduction to his forthcoming book, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger, he writes, “From the midst of life, a receptivity is born. At ‘the age’ one senses what is not overtly present.” Mitchell continues: “One’s very body senses the Heraclitean togetherness of things. The age is consequently an awakening to . . . the belonging-together of what is, of what is always arriving. The age is an awareness of this and as such it is a way of beginning again.”
For Heidegger’s thoughts on “place” and “space,” see Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. See also the two excellent books by Jeff Malpas: Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (esp. 1–69) and Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (esp. 39–64). For other recent books relevant to this issue, see Alejandro A. Vallega, Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds, and Andrew Mitchell, Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling. I dwell on the topic in some depth in my book The Dominion of the Dead (17–36).
The two thinkers who have given due consideration to the phenomenon of age in their respective philosophies of history are Giambattista Vico and Hegel, both of whom I discuss at length in chapter 2.
For a recent, theoretically ambitious work on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, see Dennis Sobolev, The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology. In his commentary on Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall” (130–39), Sobolev compares it to the earlier poem “Spring and Death.” Describing “Spring and Fall” as a text “strangely bereft of hope,” he identifies its main theme as “the human existential (rather than metaphysical) condition, which is expressed in the girl’s involuntary memento mori.” (Sobolev’s distinction between the metaphysical and existential is loosely analogous to my differentiation of time from age.)
Several philosophical readings of Leopardi in Italian scholarship have focused on the themes of “deception” and “illusion” in his work, as well as on his pessimism more broadly. I would draw attention here to Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino’s Il nulla e la poesia: Alla fine dell’età della tecnica: Leopardi; Antonio Prete, Il pensiero poetante and Finitudine e infinito: Su Leopardi; and Nicholas Rennie, Speculating on the Moment: The Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi, and Nietzsche. See also my own commentaries in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (186–93), as well as my article “The Magic of Leopardi.”
Anthropos
The bibliography related to human cognition and its evolutionary history is practically endless. The book from which I have most benefited on the topic is Origins of Intelligence: The Evolution of Cognitive Development in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, by Sue Taylor Parker and Michael L. McKinney. This impressive study (which I discuss in more detail in the next section) contains a vast bibliography of books and articles on the origins of human intelligence to which I refer the interested reader.
On wonder, see the article by my colleague Andrea Nightingale, to whom this book is dedicated, “On Wandering and Wondering: ‘Theôria’ in Greek Philosophy and Culture,” as well as her book Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greece. See also Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe.
On the role that neophilia plays in the psychic history of the human species, see Winifred Gallagher, New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change. See also Michael North, Novelty, an intellectual history of the ways in which the concept of the “new” has been employed, to varying ends, in art, philosophy, religion, and science.
The excerpts I quote from Sophocles’s Ode on Man come from Ralph Manheim’s English translation of Martin Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (123–24). While perhaps not the most literal, it is, in my view, the most vivid and dramatic English rendition. For an exhaustive discussion of Antigone and its reception over the centuries, see George Steiner’s magisterial book Antigones.
For a book-length study of the Sphinx myth, see Almut-Barbara Renger, Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau. See also the afterword to Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many (319–36), as well as Freddie Rokem, “One Voice and Many Legs: Oedipus and the Riddle of the Sphinx.” Lowell Edmunds, Oedipus, in the Routledge series “Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World,” features an extensive bibliography of helpful related materials.
Neoteny
I would like to make it clear that, while I accord a special importance to the role neoteny may have played in human evolution, my overall argument for what I call “cultural neoteny” does not depend on, or presuppose, the veracity of the claims that various evolutionary biologists have made in favor of human neoteny. I have examined those claims in detail, as well as those that argue against them. In my discussion of the evolutionary material I have relied mostly on the work of Stephen Jay Gould, above all his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny, as well as some of the essays in his collection Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (see “The Child as Man’s Real Father,” 63–69; “Human Babies as Embryos,” 70–78; “Size and Shape,” 171–78; and “Sizing Up Human Intelligence,” 179–85).
I am aware that Gould’s strong advocacy for human neoteny is by no means uncontested or unproblematic. Perhaps the most frontal challenge to Gould comes from Parker and McKinney, in Origins of Intelligence, referenced in the previous section. The authors of this book describe their approach as “comparative developmental evolutionary studies,” an approach that seeks to combine insights from the subdisciplines of developmental psychology, biological anthropology and comparative psychology, and evolutionary biology. Such a comprehensive framework allows them to track the cognitive development of humans alongside that of monkeys and apes, leading them to conclude that “the stages of development of human cognition roughly recapitulate the stages of their evolution” (xii). Origins of Intelligence synthesizes a massive amount of research and, while presenting novel ideas, is indebted to a substantial body of earlier work on human and primate intelligence. For the purposes of my own cultural history, the book is of particular interest because of the objections it raises to the “juvenilization model” so influentially promoted by Gould and others (on the juvenilization thesis and debates on underdevelopment versus overdevelopment, see chapter 12, “The Evolution and Development of the Brain,” esp. 336–45). Against Gould, they argue in favor of evolutionary progress, defending the idea that humans are “the result of a general trend toward increasing complexity, both morphological and behavioral, that has characterized the history of life” (346).
If Parker and McKinney are right, then what they call “adultification” is at least, if not more, important for human evolution than juvenilization. I have no authority to evaluate the scientific soundness of their claims, yet I find it reassuring that my own theory of cultural neoteny also advances a theory of adultification of sorts. More precisely, I argue that juvenilization practically necessitates adultification. As I put it in the closing paragraph of chapter 1: “If it is true that the child is father of the man, it is because the child obliges the man to become a father, that is, to develop a degree of social, political, and moral maturity that is unheard of in the animal kingdom.”
For Gould’s treatment of Haeckel, see Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 76–85 and 167–206, where Gould discusses “the unsuccessful attempts of empirical cataloguers to refute Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation.” Gould’s contention is that “the biogenetic law fell only when it became unfashionable in approach (due to the rise of experimental embryology) and finally untenable in theory (when the establishment of Mendelian genetics converted previous exceptions into new expectations).” Thus, Gould claims, “the biogenetic law was not disproved by a direct scrutiny of its supposed operation; it fell because research in related fields refuted its necessary mechanism” (168).
See also Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, especially chapter 5, “Evolutionary Morphology in the Darwinian Mode” (113–70). Richards criticizes past readers of Haeckel including, notably, Gould (as well as Peter Bowler) for distorting the relation between Darwin and Haeckel for ideological reasons, maximizing the differences between the two and unduly minimizing their similarities. Richards also criticizes Gould and others for both diminishing the importance of Haeckel’s insights and exaggerating the pernicious ideological influence of his work.
Gould addresses recapitulation in part 1 of Ontogeny and Phylogeny, and neoteny in particular in part 2, esp. chapter 9 (“Progenesis and Neoteny”) and chapter 10 (“Retardation and Neoteny in Human Evolution”). For his thoughts on Bolk, see 356–63.
Richards also discusses recapitulation extensively in The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory, esp. chapters 4–6. Here too, he takes Gould and others to task for reading their own political sensibilities back into Darwin’s work and suppressing any similarities between Darwin and Haeckel, for example, by downplaying the importance of recapitulation in Darwin’s work. Against Gould and other so-called antiprogressivists, Richards argues in favor of a (qualified) progressivist reading of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. For a full treatment of the moral and social consequences of his interpretation, and for a critique of Gould’s and others’ revisionist readings, see also Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior.
On fetalization and neoteny, see, in addition to Gould, Ashley Montagu, Growing Young; Clive Bromhall, The Eternal Child: How Evolution Has Made Children of Us All; and Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind. For a discussion of juvenilization in nature, see chapter 5 of Andreas Suchantke, Eco-Geography. For a sociological take on the phenomenon of juvenilization, see Marcel Danesi, Forever Young: The Teen-aging of Modern Culture; for a more philosophical take, see Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations.
On childhood development, see Juan Carlos Gómez, Apes, Monkeys, Children, and the Growth of Mind; Ze’ev Hochberg, Evo-Devo of Child Growth: A Treatise on Child Growth and Human Evolution; and Barry Bogin, Patterns of Human Growth and The Growth of Humanity. On the role of play in childhood development, see the excellent collection Play and Development, edited by Artin Göncü and Suzanne Gaskins (esp. the editors’ introduction, 3–18 and the contribution by Peter K. Smith, “Evolutionary Foundations and Functions of Play: An Overview,” 21–50). See also Developing Theories of Mind, edited by Harris J. Astington, Paul L. Harris, and David R. Olson (esp. part 1, “Development Origins of Children’s Knowledge of the Mind”).
It is well known by now that our aptitude for learning has a cultural as well as a neurological basis. As primates age, their capacities to form new neuronal connections and modify existing ones—both of which are involved in learning—are significantly reduced; see Marcus Jacobson, “Development of Specific Neuronal Connections” (1969), quoted in Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 547). Human beings, by contrast, retain these capacities to a much greater extent as they age. One could say that even in our old age the child in us (in some of us, that is) continues to wonder, study, and learn. In Gould’s words, “Human development is so strongly retarded that even mature adults retain sufficient flexibility for our adaptive status as a learning animal” (Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 401).
There are many biographies of Einstein, notably those by Ronald Clark, Albrecht Fölsing, Walter Isaacson, and Jürgen Neffe. Neffe quotes Einstein as saying, “When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seems to lie in the following circumstance. The normal adult never bothers his head about spacetime problems. Everything there is to be thought about it, in his opinion, has already been done in early childhood. I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I only began to wonder about space and time when I was already grown up. In consequence I probed deeper into the problem than an ordinary child would have done.” Neffe, Einstein: A Biography, 27. See also the chapter “Albert Einstein: The Perennial Child,” in Howard Gardner, Creative Minds (87–136).
On plasticity, see Mary-Jane West-Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution; Peter R. Huttenlocher, Neural Plasticity: The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex; and the excellent collection of essays in La sinuosité du vivant, edited by Patrizia d’Alessio (especially D’Alessio’s essay on the phenomenon of elasticity, “Transmission des emotions de Fuller à Vygotsky,” 15–30).
For a critical look at “transhumanist” dreams of immortality, see Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. For other recent books on the topic of prolonged life expectancies and the prospect of biological immortality, see Stephen Hall, Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension; Elaine Dewar, The Second Tree: Of Clones, Chimeras, and Quests for Immortality; and Guy Brown, The Living End: The New Sciences of Death, Ageing, and Immortality.
The Albino Gorilla
Several recent studies offer Darwinian-evolutionary accounts of the origins of storytelling and of the place of storytelling in human life. For anyone interested in the current debates, I recommend two issues of the journal Critical Inquiry. In the Winter 2011 issue (37, no. 2), Jonathan Kramnick’s article “Against Literary Darwinism” (315–47) presents a comprehensive, forceful critique of recent literature on the subject by humanists and scientists alike. The Winter 2012 issue (38, no. 2) features responses to Kramnick by Paul Bloom, Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Vanessa L. Ryan, G. Gabrielle Starr, and Blakey Vermeule, along with a response from Kramnick to his critics.
Image, Eye, and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility, edited by Birgitte Grundtvig, Martin McLaughlin, and Lene Waage Petersen, offers a relevant collection of essays on Calvino, interpreting his work through the optic of “seeing” and “visibility.” On Calvino and Copito de Nieve in particular, see my essay “Toward a Philosophy of Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon (447–60). See also Carrie Rohman’s “On Singularity and the Symbolic: The Threshold of the Human in Calvino’s Mr. Palomar”; Stefano Franchi’s superb essay “Palomar, the Triviality of Modernity, and the Doctrine of the Void”; Brian Fitzgerald, “Animals, Evolution, Language: Aspects of Whitehead in Italo Calvino’s Palomar”; Isaac Rosier, “The Body, Eros, and the Limits of Objectivity in Calvino’s Palomar”; and Sharon Wood, “The Reflections of Mr. Palomar and Mr. Cogito: Italo Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert.”
For a documentary on the real-life gorilla Copito de Nieve, see Snowflake: The White Gorilla, first aired on PBS in 2005 and viewable online at http://video.pbs.org/video/1439146653.
For Heidegger on animality versus humanity, see The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (esp. 186–273). Heidegger dwells at length in this book (based on a lecture course he gave in 1929–30) on the zoological work of theoretical biologist Jacob von Uexküll (201–64). For a much shorter discussion of Uexküll, largely derivative of Heidegger’s analysis, see Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal (39–46).
Uexküll’s A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning was recently republished in English by the University of Minnesota Press. For an overview of biosemiotics, the field he helped establish, see Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis, edited by Marcello Barbieri. For a useful introductory article, see Kalevi Kull, “Jakob von Uexküll: An Introduction.”
For a heavily Heidegger-indebted approach to “captivation,” see Agamben, The Open, esp. 49–62. See also Donald Turner, “Humanity as Shepherd of Being: Heidegger’s Philosophy and the Animal Other.”
Jacques Derrida also discusses Benommenheit, or captivation, in volume 2 of his posthumous The Beast and the Sovereign. David Farrell Krell analyzes this seminar in Derrida and Our Animal Others. Krell is also the author of an earlier book, Daimon Life, that deals with these same issues of animality and humanity.
On anthropocentrism, see Gary Steiner’s books Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy, Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship, and Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism. See also Martha Nussbaum, “Humans and Other Animals,” as well as the essays collected in Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments, edited by Rob Boddice.
On the connection between speech and infancy, see Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, especially the title essay (11–64) and the second essay, “In Playland: Reflections on History and Play” (65–88).
From a Common Spring
Freud’s dictum “anatomy is destiny” comes from his 1912 essay “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love.” In context, it refers more to the positionality of the human genitals than to their gender, hence I am interpreting the saying more in light of Freud’s general theories about sexual difference than in light of this essay’s preoccupation with debasement in the sphere of erotic love.
For a helpful general introduction to feminist critiques of Freud, see Danielle Ramsey, “Feminism and Psychoanalysis,” in The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism, edited by Sarah Gamble (133–40). See also the essays in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Teresa Brennan; Mary Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis; and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism.
On Ezra Pound and Chinese poetry, see Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry. See also the critical edition of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa (posthumously edited by Pound).
In a personal communication, my friend and former Stanford colleague Weixing Su, who teaches literature at the University of Peking, wrote the following about Li Po’s poem “The River Merchant’s Wife.” I quote from her letter with her permission:
This poem, “Song of Chokan,” takes its title from the village of Chokan, the native village of both husband and wife, where apparently they also make their matrimonial home. In Li Po’s time, this place was just south of Nanjing (then called Jinlin), but now it forms part of the much-expanded city. As the wife “writes” to her husband, it is early autumn—“the eighth month” on the lunar calendar, hence September rather than August, as in Pound’s rendition. Up the Yangtze, from the port of Nanjing to the evocative destination she identifies—”far Ku-to-yen, by the river of the swirling eddies” (or “Yanyudui in Qutang Gorge”)—her husband’s westward journey has taken him over a thousand miles from home. In the version of Li Po’s poem I have at hand, a few lines run somewhat differently from the English translation: “At sixteen you went afar / to Yanyudui in Qutang Gorge. / It was not to be touched in the fifth month, / the monkeys cried sorrowfully high above.” Qutang Gorge is the first, i.e., westernmost, of the renowned Three Gorges on the Yangtze (“the narrows of the river Kiang” later in the poem), in present-day Sichuan province, and the most sublime and perilous of the three. Until the mid-twentieth century, a giant boulder named Yanyudui marked the entrance of this gorge. Every year “in the fifth month,” or June, severe summer inundation would submerge the boulder under the torrential stream, turning it into a treacherous shoal “not to be touched.” Such proverbial perils to which her husband’s voyage is vulnerable must have given a sharper edge to the girl’s sense of mortality, and vicariously she hears mortal lamentation in the cries of monkeys that were known to populate the mountainsides of the Three Gorges region. Upon his return, she is indeed eager to go far out to meet him, for Cho-Fu-Sa, a historic site on the Yangtze also known for its perilous shoals, is situated some two hundred miles west of her hometown. This place name, now spelt Chang Feng Sha, literally means “long drafts of sandy wind.” (The boulder Yanyudui and the shoals at Cho-Fu-Sa, as I learned, have all been blown up by now for safer passage. Thus one by one we remove the edges of our mortality.)
According to the notes I have at hand, “Song of Chokan” was most likely composed during the poet’s first visit to Nanjing in the year 726, when he was twenty-five. Li Po would have known firsthand, at least in part, the river merchant’s journey. The year before he composed the poem, the poet had set out on his first great voyage out of mountain-encircled Sichuan province, his home since the age of four. Floating briskly down the Yangtze through the Three Gorges, “amid the ceaseless cries of monkeys on the river banks,” as he wrote in a poem every schoolchild here knows by heart, he initiated a journey that was to take him far east, to Nanjing and beyond.
I am grateful to Weixing Su for reading a draft of this book prior to its publication. I have benefited greatly from her comments.
Regarding the cultural history of the timing of psychological maturation as well as the multiplication of stages between childhood and adulthood in our era, the following comments may be of interest to some readers. In 1904 G. Stanley Hall published his seminal book Adolescence, which “discovered” a transitional stage between youth and adulthood. Hall understood adolescence as more than a physiological phase of hormonal change. He argued that it emerged as a result of specific institutional changes that took place at the turn of the twentieth century, most notably the child-labor laws that mandated a minimum age of sixteen to enter the workforce and the universal-education laws that kept teenagers in secondary school. These developments in first-world societies prolonged the period of childhood and delayed, through institutional reforms, the advent of adulthood.
A century later an article by Jeffrey Arnett identified yet another transitional stage between youth and adulthood. Arnett applied the term “emerging adulthood” to the increasingly large proportion of first-world citizens in their twenties who have neither jobs nor families of their own. These emerging adults spend most of their time exploring professional, amorous, and worldview options, without committing to any of them. In Arnett’s words, they have “left the dependency of childhood and adolescence . . . [but] not yet entered the enduring responsibilities that are normative in adulthood.” Arnett, “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens through the Twenties,” 469. Emerging adulthood is itself an emergent phenomenon, arising only recently, once again thanks to various social, economic, and technological luxuries that permit the onset of adulthood to be pushed further and further back for a certain class of people across the globe. All of which confirms yet again that a historical age, through its institutional dynamism, often has a direct impact on the aging process itself.
The Child Progenitor
For Wordsworth’s letter, see his Fenwick Notes.
On poetry and childhood in the Romantic era, see, Anna Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture; Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood; Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood; and G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth and Feeling: The Poetry of an Adult Child. On “Ode: Intimations of Immortality . . . ,” see Geoffrey Durant, Wordsworth and the Great System: A Study of Wordsworth’s Poetic Universe, 99–112. For a classic, still vibrant commentary on the ode, see Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, 125–54.
For my reading of Wordsworth in general, I have benefited from The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill. Also, Douglas B. Wilson, The Romantic Dream: Wordsworth and the Poet of the Unconscious, and Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth. For a recent study, see Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are.
My reading of the nuances of Bonnefoy’s poem “Une Voix” benefited from the insightful comments that my friend Samia Kassab offered on an early draft of these few pages of analysis. Kassab is the author of, among other works, La métaphore dans la poésie de Baudelaire. For some major works of Bonnefoy scholarship in English, see by Mary-Anne Caws, Yves Bonnefoy; John Naughton, The Poetics of Bonnefoy; and Robert Greene, Searching for Presence; and Michael G. Kelly, Strands of Utopia, chapters 5, 10, and 15. See also my late colleague Joseph Frank’s foreword to The Act and the Place of Poetry: Selected Essays by Yves Bonnefoy, as well as his essay “Yves Bonnefoy: Notes of an Admirer,” in Frank, Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture.
I believe Bonnefoy is the greatest French poet since Apollinaire. Much of his poetic corpus is available in English. Prominent translations include Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991–2011; The Present Hour; The Arrière-Pays; an edition (named after the collections it contains) comprising Beginning and End of Snow and Where the Arrow Falls; The Curved Planks; In the Lure of Language; The Horizon; Yesterday’s Wilderness Kingdom; the collection New and Selected Poems; The Lure and the Truth of Painting; In the Shadow’s Light; On the Motion and Immobility of Douve; Early Poems 1947–1959; The Act and Place of Poetry; Things Dying Things Newborn; Poems 1959–1975 (a translation of Pierre écrite and Dans le leurre du soleil); and Words in Stone.
Chapter Two: Wisdom and Genius
Nowadays few people use the label Homo sapiens sapiens, given that the other major subspecies of Homo sapiens—namely Homo sapiens idaltu—has long been extinct. Some believe that the Denisovans as well as Homo rhodesiensis, various fossils of which were discovered recently, should also be considered subspecies of Homo sapiens. The status of the Neanderthals remains ambiguous. Many consider them a subspecies as well (hence the label Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). In my book The Dominion of the Dead, I claim that humanity is not a species but a way of being mortal, hence that the Neanderthals, who seem to have possessed an awareness of death (evidenced by burial rituals), should be regarded as human in the essential cultural sense of the term, even if they do not belong to our biological species (see p. 34). If it could be shown that they maintained long-term relations with the dead, that would be enough, from my point of view, to consider them “sapient” in both of the senses I discuss in this chapter (namely, both ingenious and wise).
My use of the term “wisdom” in this book shares a family resemblance with the conventional conceptions and connotations, yet it also deviates significantly from them. For an excellent history of the world’s wisdom traditions, see Robert Sternberg, Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development.
Abbott Payson Usher’s A History of Mechanical Inventions, originally published in 1929, remains a classic historical account of technological innovation over the centuries. See also Lewis Mumford’s “Renewal of Life” series, starting with Technics and Civilization, first published in 1934. Also excellent is the two-volume Technology in Western Civilization, edited by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell. Among more recent publications, see Arnold Pacey’s books Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History and The Maze of Ingenuity, and An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology, edited by Ian McNeil. McNeil subsequently edited, with Lance Day, the Biographical Dictionary of the History of Technology, which expands upon some of the most notable figures of the earlier encyclopedia. More popular works include Donald Cardwell’s Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets. For more recent introductory volumes, see James E. McClellan III and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction, and Daniel Headrick, Technology: A World History. See also T. K. Derry and Trevor I. Williams, A Short History of Technology. I am especially taken with Friedrich Kittler’s more theoretically oriented work on technology, media, and information systems, Literature, Media, and Information Systems and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Optical Media and Discourse Networks 1800/1900 are also excellent volumes). For a sociological examination of the development of network culture, see my colleague Fred Turner’s book From Counterculture to Cyberculture; for accounts of more recent digital innovation, Johnny Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, and Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet; and for an ambitious theory of media transformation, Marshall T. Poe, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet.
A Note on Age and Wisdom
I take the H. L. Mencken quote from Wayne Booth, The Art of Growing Older: Writers on Living and Aging (186). This well-conceived book contains excerpts by writers across the ages on the topic of growing older, interspersed with reflections and commentaries by Booth. The quotes from Montaigne in this section also come from Booth’s volume (232–33). There have been many studies on varying conceptions of, and attitudes toward, “old age” in Western culture. I would draw attention here to Georges Minois, History of Old Age: From Antiquity to the Renaissance (originally published as Histoire de la vieillesse). On Montaigne and aging, see Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, 258–300.
The perceived vulgarization, if not decline, of civilization is a prevalent, almost universal, sentiment in world cultures (see the notes under the heading “Generation Gaps” below). Classic works on the theme of the decline of civilization, which go beyond the impressionism of sentiment, include Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (see volumes 4–6 on the “breakdowns” and “disintegrations” of civilizations). See also E. A. Thompson, Romans and Barbarians: The Decline of the Western Empire, and J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall. For an ecological account of select cases of dramatic societal decline and collapse, see Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
The River and the Volcano
Quotations from the Timaeus are from Benjamin Jowett’s translation of the Dialogues; see vol. 3, 443–47. For an older treatment of Plato’s myth of Atlantis, see Phyllis Young Forsyth, Atlantis: The Making of Myth. For a more recent treatment, see the user-friendly volume by the esteemed French historian and classicist Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato’s Myth.
Much of the field of cultural geography in the Anglophone world has been shaped by the work of Carl Sauer. Those interested in his founding role should read the essays dedicated to his life and work in the volume Carl Sauer on Culture and Landscape: Readings and Commentaries, edited by William M. Denevan and Kent Mathewson. On historical geography in general, see Geography and History: Bridging the Divide, edited by Alan R. H. Baker, as well as Baker’s earlier volume, coedited with Mark Billinge, Period and Place, Research Methods in Historical Geography. Other titles include Human Geography: Society, Space, and Social Science, edited by Derek Gregory, Ron Martin, and Graham Smith; Historical Geography: Progress and Prospect, edited by Michael Pacione; and Robert A. Dodgshon, Society in Time and Space: A Geographical Perspective on Change. See also the critical discussion in Leonard Guelke, Historical Understanding in Geography: An Idealist Approach, esp. chapter 1; The Cultural Geography Reader, edited by Timothy S. Oakes and Patricia L. Price; and People, Land and Time: A Historical Introduction to the Relations between Landscape, Culture, and Environment, edited by Peter Atkins, Ian Gordon Simmons, and Brian K. Roberts. I am grateful to my Stanford colleague Martin W. Lewis, a historical geographer and author of, among other works, the 1997 book The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (with Karen E. Wigen), for expanding my understanding of the discipline of geography; I discuss the topic with him on my radio show and podcast Entitled Opinions (November 9, 2011).
For a useful comparative study of the relations and differences between Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations, see Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean. I also profited from Nicolas Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, and Ian Shaw, The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt.
There are notable precedents (Ibn Khaldun, for example), yet Giambattista Vico is arguably the most important and compelling modern proponent of a cyclical theory of history. (For more on Vico see the notes under the heading “Heterochrony” below.) For a more recent, sociologically oriented version of cyclical history, see the work of Arthur Meier Schlesinger, above all The Cycles of American History, a book influenced by his father Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., author of Paths to the Present. An influential precursor to their work can be found in the ideas of nineteenth-century political economist Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher, author of the five-volume System der Volkwirthschaft and Principles of Political Economy.
For the importance of the classical tradition to the American founders and to American education generally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780–1910, by my Stanford colleague Caroline Winterer. I discuss this topic with her in my radio show and podcast Entitled Opinions (January 18, 2011).
Children of Science
For useful introductions to the history of the scientific method, see Barry Gower, Scientific Method: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction, as well as the essays in Histories of Scientific Observation, edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck. See also Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey, and Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge. Paul Karl Feyerabend’s Against Method remains a classic in its genre, as does Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, two books to which I am especially indebted in these pages.
Walter Benjamin’s important essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” can be found in Illuminations, 253–64 (see esp. 257–58 for the thesis on the angel). For Benjamin’s “angel of history,” see Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, and O. K. Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian.” See also Giorgio Agamben, “Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption,” in Potentialities (138–59).
The quotes from Saint-Exupéry come from his essay “The Tool,” in Wind, Sand, and Stars (41–47). This collection was originally published in French as Terre des hommes. Jean-Paul Sartre briefly discusses this essay from a related but different perspective than my own in the first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason (452–53).
The concept of “deep time” was developed by the Scottish geologist James Hutton (see his four-volume Theory of the Earth). Stephen Jay Gould provides an excellent discussion of its discovery in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1–20, 61–98). See also Stephen Baxter, Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time; Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life; Dennis R. Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology; and M. J. S. Rudwick’s impressive Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Wai Chee Dimock has recently applied the concept of deep time to the study of American literature (see Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time), as has Sabrina Ferri with respect to French and Italian literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her recently completed book manuscript, The Past in Ruins: History and Nature in Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Italy, Ferri treats, among other things, the impact of the discovery of the age of the earth on the poetic and historiographical imagination in the period that connects Giambattista Vico to Giacomo Leopardi. See also her articles on geology and the poetics of ruins: “Lazzaro Spallanzani’s Hybrid Ruins: A Scientist at Serapis and Troy” and “Time in Ruins: Melancholy and Modernity in the Pre-Romantic Natural Picturesque.”
Heterochrony
For more on the evolutionary concept and role of heterochrony, see Michael L. McKinney and Ken McNamara, Heterochrony: The Evolution of Ontogeny; Heterochrony in Evolution: A Multidisciplinary Approach, edited by Michael L. McKinney; and Evolutionary Change and Heterochrony, edited by Ken McNamara. For a more recent work, see Miriam Zelditch, Beyond Heterochrony: The Evolution of Development.
For excellent, comprehensive accounts of Hegel’s thought, see Charles Taylor, Hegel, and Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography. See also The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, edited by Frederick Beiser. For an approach focused on the role of memory in Hegel’s system, see Rebecca Comay, Memory in Hegel and Heidegger. In part 2 of Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss offers a compelling discussion of Hegel’s philosophy of history, with many pertinent analyses of universal history (79–152).
Vico has a number of excellent Anglophone commentators, including R. G. Collingwood, Isaiah Berlin, Samuel Beckett, Donald Verene, Hayden White, Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Mark Lilla, Peter Burke, and Sandra Luft (see bibliography for titles). I have commented on Vico at some length in two of my previous books, Forests (3–60, 133–42, 164–70) and The Dominion of the Dead (esp. 17–54, 72–105).
On the theme of disenchantment, see the classic study by Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment, as well as Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion. See also the excellent book by Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World. On the theme of “reenchantment,” see The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, edited by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, which includes an exhaustive bibliography on disenchantment. On disenchantment and secularization, see Charles Taylor’s magisterial study A Secular Age.
For a review of the religious foundations of Roman piety, see W. Warde Fowler’s extraordinary Gifford Lectures, collected and published as The Religious Experience of the Roman People. See also Valerie M. Warrior’s useful introduction Roman Religion (esp. 25–70). On patriarchy and piety, see Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture. For an analysis of Aeneas’s piety in particular, see Eve Adler, Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid (167–92, 219–300).
Those interested in reading the source of the Greek theogony I draw on in this section may consult Glenn Most’s critical edition of Hesiod’s Theogony in the Loeb Classical Library series (in the same volume are Hesiod’s Works and Days and Testimonia). Greek Mythology and Poetics, by Gregory Nagy, remains a classic study. See also Yves Bonnefoy, Greek and Roman Mythologies, and the Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, edited by Roger D. Woodard.
For generational conflict in Greece and Rome, see the excellent collection The Conflict of Generations in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Stephen Bertman. For an interesting study of Oedipal conflict between the generations of Greek gods, see Richard S. Caldwell, The Origin of the Gods: A Psychoanalytic Study of Greek Theogonic Myth. See also Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Murder among Friends: A Violation of Philia in Greek Tragedy.
Generation Gaps
On the topic of social embeddedness and generativity, see Gunhild O. Hagestad and Peter Uhlenberg, “The Social Separation of Old and Young: A Root of Ageism.” For a much broader treatment of the family dynamics of age and generations, see Ingrid A. Connidis, Family Ties and Aging.
The locus classicus of sociological generation gaps is the so-called Strauss-Howe generational theory. William Strauss and Neil Howe’s 1991 book Generations deals specifically with American history across the centuries; several other coauthored works have been published since then. Karl Mannheim’s work is an important precursor; see his essay “The Problem of Generations.” For a recent sociological commentary on these and other related issues, see also Karen Foster, Generation, Discourse, and Social Change, and Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham, Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age and Family in the New World Economy. On the generation gap of the 1960s and its political aftermath, see Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s.
I suggest in this chapter that deep generation gaps prevail in societies informed by “insurrectional” rather than “pious” forms of cultural heterochrony, yet the sentiment of estrangement among the elderly vis-à-vis the younger generations is a recurrent motif in many world cultures. In Praise of Shadows, written in 1933 by the Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, contains a passage that is worth quoting here, as it resonates with some of the main themes of my chapter 2:
It struck me [recently] that old people everywhere have the same laments. The older we get the more we seem to think that everything was better in the past. . . . Never has there been an age that people have been satisfied with. But in recent years the pace of progress has been so precipitous that conditions in our own country [Japan] go somewhat beyond the ordinary. The changes that have taken place since the Restoration of 1867 must be at least as great as those of the preceding three and a half centuries.
It will seem odd, I suppose, that I should go on in this vein, as if I too were grumbling in my dotage. Yet of this I am convinced, that the conveniences of modern culture cater exclusively to youth, and that the times grow increasingly inconsiderate of old people. (39)
Tanizaki overstates the case, to be sure, since a number of the conveniences of modern culture cater to the old as well as the young, yet there is no question that the introduction of new conveniences alter the life worlds of a given society or culture. World alteration, almost by definition, unsettles older people more than younger people, whether the new conveniences cater specifically to the young or not. See, in chapter 4, the sections headed “Amor Mundi and a Poem about Going” and “The New Ones” for my discussion of this dynamic.
Tragic Wisdom
For an approach to Greek tragic theater that emphasizes the elements I consider most crucial, see Rush Rehm’s remarkable books Greek Tragic Theater and The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy. Another book that I found especially insightful is Daniel Mendelsohn’s Gender and the City in Euripides’s Political Plays. H. D. F. Kitto’s Greek Tragedy remains an invaluable introduction to the tragic genre among the Greeks. On the emergence of that genre, see Glen Most’s “Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic.” Other useful works, among a great many, include David Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation; R. B. Rutherford, Greek Tragic Style: Form, Language, and Interpretation; and James Barrett, Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy. For an inspired, free-ranging reflection on tragedy across the ages and across genres, see Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. See also J. M. Bernstein’s entry on “Tragedy,” chapter 3 in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, edited by Richard Eldridge, who himself discusses tragedy in “What Can Tragedy Matter for Us?,” chapter 8 in his The Persistence of Romanticism.
On King Lear, I have been especially inspired by Stanley Cavell’s “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” as well as William Elton’s magisterial King Lear and the Gods. For an analysis of Shakespeare’s corpus through the lens of age and ages, see David Bevington’s books Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience and Shakespeare’s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and Earth.
Chapter Three: Neotenic Revolutions
Preamble
A neotenic revolution, as I conceive it, has a dynamic that is altogether sui generis. The case studies I deal with in this chapter put into relief exactly what that dynamic consists of. I have surveyed various other theories of revolution, if only to gauge how they contrast with my own. In this regard I have profited from an essay by my colleague Dan Edelstein, “Do We Want a Revolution without a Revolution? Reflections on Political Authority,” which discusses the problems entailed by theorizing revolution and contains a useful bibliography of some of the most notable theories; of note are Reinhart Koselleck’s essay “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution,” and Alain Rey’s Révolution: Histoire d’un mot. For an account of the emergence of what we now think of as “revolution,” see Keith Baker’s Inventing the French Revolution (esp. 203–23). See also the essays collected in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820, edited by Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman. Finally, I found helpful two books edited by John Foran, Theorizing Revolutions and The Future of Revolutions, as well as one edited by Foran, David Lane, and Andreja Zivkovic, Revolution in the Making of the Modern World.
Socratic Genius
On Socrates, see Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher. See also the Cambridge Companion to Socrates, edited by Donald Morrison, and A Companion to Socrates, edited by Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar. These volumes contain thorough bibliographies of the countless excellent books and essays devoted to the figure of Socrates. For studies of Socratic philosophy and its ongoing relevance in our day, I would draw special attention to two essay collections by Alexander Nehamas: The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault and Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates. A classic study of Socrates’s putative corruption of the Athenian youth is C. D. C. Reeve, Socrates in the Apology. On Socrates and his politics, see Richard Kraut, Socrates and the State.
In De Senectute (On Old Age), Cicero uses the term adulescentia in his discussion of the four main stages of life. Adulescentia comes after youth (pueritia, seventeen or younger) and before middle age (aetas media, forty or older). Thus, the Roman concept of adulescentia is by no means identical with the modern concept of adolescence, which we consider a psychological, hormonal, and institutional stage of transition from puberty to adulthood. The classic study of adolescence in the latter, modern sense is Stanley Hall’s foundational book Adolescence, which has lost little of its relevance since its publication some nine decades ago. On this difference between Roman and modern concepts of adolescence, see Marc Kleijwegt, Ancient Youth: The Ambiguity of Youth and the Absence of Adolescence in Greco-Roman Society, and Christian Laes, Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within. On the rise of the modern view of adolescence, see also (among many other studies) Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn of the Century America; Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present; Marcel Danesi, Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence; and Louise J. Kaplan’s personal recollection Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood.
Quotations from the Republic are from Benjamin Jowett’s translation of the Dialogues; see vol. 3, 5–6. For other perspectives on the figure of Cephalus, see Terence Irwin, Plato’s Ethics (170–71); Nickolas Pappas, The Routledge Guide Book to Plato and the Republic (30–32); and Stanley Rosen, “Cephalus and Polemarchus.” For an interpretation that shares affinities with mine, see C. D. C. Reeve, “Cephalus, Odysseus, and the Importance of Experience.”
Platonic Wisdom
For a fine collection of essays that question the standard account of the transition from mythos to logos in Greek culture, see From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, edited by Richard Buxton. I find particularly helpful the contribution by Glenn Most, “From Logos to Mythos” (25–50). Buxton is also author of two fine studies on Greek mythology, Imaginary Greece and Myths and Tragedies in Their Ancient Greek Contexts. One of the finest treatments of Plato’s engagement with myth and various literary genres is Andrea Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue. See also the essays collected in Plato and Myth: Studies in the Use and Status of Platonic Myths, edited by Catherine Collobert, Pierre Destrée, and Francisco J. Gonzalez. In the same series, see Plato and the Poets, edited by Pierre Destrée and Fritz-Gregor Herrmann. Other valuable studies include Plato’s Myths, edited by Catalin Partenie; Plato the Myth Maker by Luc Brisson; and the Oxford World Classics volume on Plato’s Selected Myths. See also Jonathan Lear, “Allegory and Myth in Plato’s Republic.”
On the figure of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, see Gregory Vlastos’s chapter “Socrates Contra Socrates in Plato,” in Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (45–80), as well as Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 87–108. See also Sandra Peterson, Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato.
The Child and the Kingdom
For those interested in what I call Christianity’s “theology of the child,” I recommend, among other studies, The Child in Christian Thought, edited by Marcia JoAnn Bunge; The Child in the Bible, edited by Marcia J. Bunge, Terence E. Fretheim, and Beverly Roberts Gaventa; and Let the Little Children Come to Me: Childhood and Children in Early Christianity, edited by Cornelia B. Horn and John W. Martens.
On Nietzsche and Christianity, see Jörg Salaquarda, “Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition”; on Nietzsche and transvaluation, see Kathleen Marie Higgins, “Rebaptizing Our Evil: On the Revaluation of All Values.” See also the section on revaluation in Brian Leiter, The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality (26–35). An especially good recent study is Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism.
On the “fools for Christ” tradition that drew inspiration from Saint Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians, see the magisterial Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, by Sergey Ivanov.
Several contemporary philosophers have not only engaged Paul in depth but also appropriated him in one way or another. See, for example, Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism; Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans; and Slavoj Zizek, “The Politics of Truth or Alain Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul.” See also Saint Paul among the Philosophers, edited by John D. Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff, for more essays on Saint Paul in contemporary European philosophy.
On Saint Paul in general, and his theology of conversion in particular, see Richard Peace, Conversion in the New Testament: Paul and the Twelve; also, The Cambridge Companion to St. Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, esp. part 3, with sections by Alan F. Segal, Graham N. Stanton, L. W. Hurtado, Luke Timothy Johnson, and Brian Rosner. See also James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, for a fine study on various aspects of Paul’s thinking.
For a classic study on the theology of baptism, see George Raymond Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament. See also the collection Dimensions of Baptism: Biblical and Theological Studies, edited by Stanley E. Porter and Anthony R. Cross, as well as the massive volume Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity, edited by David Hellholm, Tor Vegge, Oyvind Norderval, and Christer Hellholm. For a more recent monograph about baptism, see Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries.
For my philosophical thinking about Christianity, I have also found interesting the work of Karl Rahner, whose most important work is Foundations of Christian Faith. See Thomas Sheehan’s excellent book Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations. See also The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, edited by Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines; Karen Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theological Philosophies; and Patrick Burke, Reinterpreting Rahner: A Critical Study of His Major Themes.
Christian Wisdom
Concerning pagan attacks on Christianity and the early church fathers’ defense against them, I have relied heavily on the detailed accounts provided by Jaroslav Pelikan in his magisterial five-volume work The Christian Tradition (volume 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, is my main source in this section). See also John Granger Cook, The Interpretation of the Old Testament in Greco-Roman Paganism, and Paganism and Christianity, 100–425 C.E.: A Sourcebook, edited by Ramsay MacMullen and Eugene Lane. For the centuries beyond those that I discuss here, see Christianity and Paganism, 350–750: The Conversion of Western Europe, edited by J. N. Hillgarth, and Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. Another book that I found especially useful is Avery Cardinal Dulles, A History of Apologetics.
On Christian and pagan debates about the relative antiquity of their respective traditions, see Arthur Droge’s excellent Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture. On the history of the concept of logos spermatikos, see the outstanding article by R. Holte, “Logos Spermatikos: Christianity and Ancient Philosophy According to Saint Justin’s Apologies.” For more on Justin Martyr’s use of this Stoic concept, see Susan Wendel, “Interpreting the Descent of the Spirit,” as well as her book Scriptural Interpretation and Community Self-Definition in Luke-Acts and the Writings of Justin Martyr. Another quite useful volume on early Christianity is Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries.
On Christian typology, see John J. O’Keefe, “Typology”; O’Keefe and R. R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretations of the Bible; Leonhardt Goppelt, Typos: The Typology Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New; and Sydney Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament: A Contemporary Hermeneutical Method.
The Child of Enlightenment
For Hegel’s views of the Enlightenment, see “Spirit,” part B, section II, “The Enlightenment,” in Phenomenology of Spirit (328–54). See also the essays in Hegel on the Modern World, edited by Ardis B. Collins, and the older study by Lewis P. Hinchman, Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment. See also—among a number of other excellent studies—Frederick Beiser, Hegel; Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought; and Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom.
On Galileo’s role as one of the founders of modern scientific method, the list of titles is vast. For an excellent introductory volume, see The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, edited by Peter Machamer. For the ins and outs of his trial, see William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius. See also Maurice Finocchiaro’s work, including his books The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992, and the Routledge Guidebook to Galileo’s Dialogue.
In Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, I discuss from another point of view Descartes’s lament that we cannot be born as adults, with the full use of our reason, but must pass through a period of childhood; see the section “The Ways of Method” (108–13).
Kant’s views about Enlightenment have received considerable scholarly attention. I would note here Katerina Deligiorgi, Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment, and Michel Foucault’s important reflections in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?”
On reason, modernity, and maturity, see David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, and the Ambivalence of Reason (on maturity and Kant in particular, 7–15). On Kant’s views of human nature, see Allen Wood, “Kant and the Problem of Human Nature”; Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Human Being and Kant’s Impure Ethics; and Patrick R. Frierson, Freedom and Anthropology in Kant’s Moral Philosophy. See also Michel Foucault’s doctoral dissertation of 1961, published in English as Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Directly pertinent to my analysis is an excellent essay by Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, “What Is Maturity?” in Foucault, Critical Reader, 109–21.
Declaring Independence
One of the studies from which I learned the most concerning the Declaration of Independence is Declaring Independence, by my late Stanford colleague Jay Fliegelman. See also Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, and Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. My reading of the small “neotenic revolution” of the opening sentence is strictly my own. I have written about in it in another context in “The Book from Which Our Literature Springs.” When he changed the word “sacred” to “self-evident,” Benjamin Franklin believed he was regrounding the truths in question on reason instead of faith, yet in my interpretation of the term, “self-evidence” contains—whether wittingly or not—a creative retrieval and reprojection of the Christian heritage of faith, traditionally defined (as I point out in this section) as the “evidence of things unseen.”
On the Lockean legacy of the Declaration’s concept of “government by consent of the governed,” see Gillian Brown, The Consent of the Governed.
The American Constitution
My historical review of the events, ideas, and sources of the American Constitution is heavily indebted to the work of Gordon S. Wood, above all his magisterial book The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787. Most of the direct quotes in this section come from this book.
Roger Williams, founder of the colony of Rhode Island, was a fascinating figure of the first wave of American Puritanism. Perry Miller writes eloquently about him in Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition. On Williams as a forerunner of the doctrine of separation of church and state, see Timothy L. Hall, Separating Church and State: Roger Williams and Religious Liberty; John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty; and Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America.
On the Federalists’ suspicion of popular democracy, see Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 483–531.
Gettysburg
For Emerson’s views on slavery, see Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, edited by Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson. On the fratricidal and sacrificial origins of Rome’s founding, see René Girard’s remarkable meditation in his “Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.” For a very different perspective, see Cynthia J. Bannon, The Brothers of Romulus: Fraternal “Pietas” in Roman Law, Literature, and Society. Both in Discourses on Livy and The Prince, Machiavelli insists on the sanguinary, sacrificial nature of Rome’s founding, attributing Rome’s greatness to that inaugural act of fratricide by Romulus. See book 1 of the Discourses (esp. 100–104). On Rome’s beginnings, see also Alexandre Grandazzi, The Foundation of Rome: Myth and History; H. H. Scullard, A History of the Roman World, 753 to 146 BC; and Augusto Fraschetti, The Foundation of Rome.
I have analyzed the Gettysburg Address from other perspectives both in my book The Dominion of the Dead (27–30) and in “America: The Struggle to Be Reborn.” There are countless commentaries on Lincoln’s Address. I would draw special attention here to the one by Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.
Chapter Four: Amor Mundi
Clarifications
Hannah Arendt’s first introduced her concept of “natality” in The Human Condition. She meant by the term the ever-present possibility that human beings, either on their own or in concert with one another, can undertake actions that will bring something new into the world. To be human means to be capable of world-altering initiatives. Or as Arendt herself puts it in one of the more moving pages of The Human Condition:
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.” (247)
In the broadest terms, my efforts in this book have been focused on clarifying and evaluating the inner cultural dynamics of natality in order to determine whether, and to what extent, our contemporary juvenescence has the character of a “miracle that saves the world” from its natural ruin, or whether it represents instead a historically unusual form of such ruin. As my epilogue makes clear, a definitive answer to this question is not available to us at this point.
On Arendt’s thinking about natality, see Patricia Bowen-Moore, Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality, and Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (esp. 4–34, “The Event of Natality: The Ontological Foundation of Human Rights”). Among recent articles, see Jonathan Schell, “A Politics of Natality”; Margarete Durst, “Birth and Natality in Hannah Arendt”; Miguel Vatter, “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt”; Mavis Louise Biss, “Arendt and the Theological Significance of Natality”; and Jeffrey Champlin, “Born Again: Arendt’s ‘Natality’ as Figure and Concept.” Arendt has an army of excellent commentators (see The Cambridge Companion Guide to Hannah Arendt, edited by Dana Villa, for an extensive bibliography). The gold-standard biography is Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl. For its depth of thought and keen insights into Arendt’s thinking, I recommend Roger Berkowitz’s introduction to Thinking in Dark Times, edited by Berkowitz, Thomas Keenan, and Jeffrey Katz (1–16), as well as several of the excellent essays included in this collection.
In his notebook, Paul Valéry wrote, “La connaissance s’étend comme un arbre, par un procédé identique à lui-même: en se répétant. Novat reiterando” (Cahiers, 3:273). In my own English translation: “Knowledge extends like a tree, by a process identical to itself: that is, by repeating itself. Novat reiterando [Renewal through repetition].” An excellent collection of essays on this remarkable French poet is Reading Paul Valéry: Universe in Mind, edited by Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson. Another fine study is Christine M. Crow, Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice.
Michael North offers an interesting account of the origins and transmission of Ezra Pound’s famous slogan “Make it new” in his compelling book Novelty: A History of the New (162–71).
On Dante’s appropriation of the pagan tradition, see Kevin Brownlee, “Dante and the Classical Poets,” and Michelangelo Picone, “Dante and the Classics.” See also Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets, and The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Commedia, edited by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey Schnapp.
On Petrarch, see Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, edited by Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi. See also Giuseppe Mazzotta’s superb The Worlds of Petrarch. On Petrarch’s humanism, see Gur Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self.
For Nietzsche and philology, see James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. For Nietzsche and ancient philosophy, see Jessica Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition. See also the essays in Nietzsche and Antiquity: Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, edited by Paul Bishop. Tracy Strong discusses Nietzsche and the Greeks in chapter 6 of his Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, as does Dennis J. Schmidt in chapter 5 of his On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life. See also Nietzsche as Scholar of Antiquity, edited by Anthony K. Jensen and Helmut Heit.
Changing the World
On genius, see Darrin MacMahon, Divine Fury, a recent book that offers an interesting and engaging history of the notion of individual genius.
On Hannah Arendt and “amor mundi,” see Marieke Borren’s remarkable dissertation “Amor Mundi: Hannah Arendt’s Political Phenomenology of the World” (http://dare.uva.nl/document/469656). See also Svetlana Boym’s moving pages on Hannah Arendt in Another Freedom (24–30, 224–32, 255–65). See also Sigrid Weigel, “Sounding Through—Poetic Difference—Self-Translation: Hannah Arendt’s Thoughts and Writings between Different Languages, Cultures, and Fields.”
On Walter Benjamin and the “destructive character,” see Irving Wohlfarth, “No-Man’s-Land: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Destructive Character,’” which is also included in a valuable collection of essays, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne.
Amor Mundi and a Poem about Going
On Larkin’s poem “Going, Going,” see the fine commentary by Rob Rollison, “Going, Going, by Philip Larkin,” on the website The Poetry Room. For scholarship on Larkin in general, here is a small sample: Janice Rossen, Philip Larkin: His Life’s Work; Tijana Stojkovic, “Unnoticed in the Casual Light of Day”: Philip Larkin and the Plain Style; Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work, edited by Dale Salwak; Salem Hassan, Philip Larkin and His Contemporaries; Stephen Cooper, Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer; and Richard Palmer, Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin.
The New Ones
On the role of children in ancient Greece, see, in addition to the works cited in the “Platonic Wisdom” section of chapter 3, Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past, edited by Jenifer Neils and John Howard Oakley; Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens; and The Conflict of Generations in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Stephen Bertman.
On Greek paideia, or education, see Werner Jaeger’s multivolume Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture.
On Bergson, perception, and memory, see G. William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson, and Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism, among other recent studies.
Young Love
On D. H. Lawrence, see Robert E. Montgomery, The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art; Jack Stewart, The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression; and the three-volume Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence, by John Worthen, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, and David Ellis. I am especially indebted to the fine studies of Lawrence’s work by Keith M. Sagar, books such as The Art of D. H. Lawrence and D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art. My reflections on Lawrence in this section are indebted to Sagar’s inspired work, which quotes abundantly from Lawrence’s corpus.
For a particularly thoughtful reflection on Emerson and his essay “Experience,” see Stanley Cavell’s essay, “Finding as Founding: Taking Steps in Emerson’s ‘Experience.’” See also the discussion of the essay in my review of Emerson’s journals entitled “Emerson: The Good Hours.”
After Long Silence
On Yeats’s poem “After Long Silence,” see the masterful essay by Marjorie Perloff, “How to Read a Poem: W. B. Yeats’s ‘After Long Silence.’”
Machiavelli’s letter to Vettori, dated December 10, 1513, is quoted from Machiavelli and His Friends, edited and translated by J. B. Atkinson and David Sices (262–65). On the letter, see John Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515. See also the Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, edited by John Najemy, and the essays in Machiavelli and Republicanism, edited by Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli. On Machiavelli, I have also been particularly inspired by my personal exchanges with the Italian scholar Gabriele Pedullà.
The most compelling image of what I call the “reverential posture” of the reader is found, in my view, in Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm”:
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Those who today still engage in deep reading are like Stevens’s “reader leaning late,” for historically speaking the hour is late indeed, even if the world is far from quiet.
We might note that the recent recommendations of Common Core State Standards for schools in America do not further the cause of wisdom. The standards, which have been adopted by forty-six states, recommend that 50 percent of fourth-grade reading and 70 percent of twelfth-grade reading be “informational” rather than “literary,” explaining that “most of the required reading in college and workforce training programs is informational in structure and content; postsecondary education programs typically provide students with both a higher volume of such reading than is generally required in K–12 schools and comparatively little scaffolding.” As the San Francisco Chronicle put it in an editorial comment: “English teachers across the country are moving Shakespeare and Keats off of the Syllabus and asking students to read federal reports and Malcolm Gladwell instead. Out with Macbeth and in with Fed-Views by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco” (“Literary Retreat,” December 2, 2012). Learning the basic skills of informational reading will no doubt help students get through college with more proficiency. What they will have to descant upon later in their lives is another matter.
Continuing Education
The anecdote about Socrates on his deathbed is cited by Italo Calvino in his essay “Why Read the Classics,” in The Uses of Literature (134). He is referring to an apocryphal version of Socrates’s final moments by the Romanian wrier Emil Cioran. The translation comes from The Uses of Literature.