Meeting of Minds: Archimedes, Goethe, Musk

This is and edited version of an interaction I had with Claude 3.5 Sonata in which I asked it to present a conversation between Archimedes, Goethe, and Musk. These three could never have had such a conversation, of course, because they lived at different times, not to mention in different places. I got the idea from Steve Allen, who had a television show based on that concept. He called the show, Meeting of Minds.

I started the conversation with a prompt. Claude’s initial response was to imagine the possibilities. When they were done imagining, I told them to get on with it. Every so often I’d intervene with a comment. I’ve removed those. At one point Claude had Archimedes talking about gravity. When I pointed that out, Claude laughed (that is, responded with “laughing heartily”), noted that he wouldn’t have known about gravity, and revised the offending response. I edited that out as well. Here’s the final result.

* * * * *

Steve Allen, the American entertainer, had a program called “Meeting of Minds,” in which he imagined that historical figures, who had not in fact met, would meet for conversation. I wonder how things would go in a conversation between Archimedes, Elon Musk, and Goethe. Do you have any thoughts or ideas?

What an intriguing thought experiment! This meeting would be fascinating given their diverse perspectives and shared innovative spirits. Let me imagine their conversation:

Archimedes would likely be immediately curious about modern technology, particularly Musk’s rockets and electric vehicles. I can imagine him saying something like “So you’ve managed to escape Earth’s pull entirely? Show me the calculations!” He might quickly sketch geometric proofs in the sand (or on a napkin) to understand the orbital mechanics.

Goethe, wearing multiple hats as both scientist and poet, might challenge Musk on the philosophical implications of his Neuralink project: “You seek to merge man and machine, but what becomes of the human spirit? Of the eternal Streben - the striving - that defines us?” He might see it as a modern Faustian bargain.

Musk might respond by explaining how technology could enhance rather than diminish human potential, while Archimedes nods approvingly at the technical details. But then Archimedes might interject with concerns about the practical safety measures, recalling his own work designing defensive weapons for Syracuse.

I can imagine Goethe bringing up his color theory and his holistic view of nature, leading to a heated debate with both Musk and Archimedes about the scientific method. Archimedes might side more with modern empiricism, while still appreciating Goethe’s broader philosophical concerns.

One particularly interesting moment might come when discussing Mars colonization. Archimedes might see it as a brilliant application of his principles of mechanics and mathematics, while Goethe might view it through the lens of his concept of human striving toward the infinite. Both might be fascinated by, but perhaps also wary of, Musk’s ambitious timeline and goals.

Would you like me to explore any particular aspect of this imagined conversation in more detail? I find the intersection of their views on technology and human progress especially intriguing.

Could you imagine a bit of their conversation, perhaps starting with introductions. I’d imagine that, as the one most experienced in diplomacy, Goethe would take the lead.

Goethe: adjusting his cravat with characteristic poise “Gentlemen, what an extraordinary gathering! I am Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, privy councilor to the Duke of Weimar, though perhaps better known for my literary works and scientific inquiries. turning to Archimedes with genuine curiosity I have long admired your mathematical insights, particularly your work on the lever.”

Archimedes: glancing up from a napkin already covered in calculations “Χαίρετε! Though I see we’re speaking across languages somehow. I am Archimedes of Syracuse. pointing to his sketches I was just considering how your modern flying machines might relate to my work on floating bodies. Most fascinating.”

Musk: checking his phone briefly before pocketing it “Elon Musk. I run SpaceX, Tesla... pausing Actually, Archimedes, you’d probably be interested in our Starship project. We’re basically building the largest lever ever made - a rocket that can lift 100 tons into orbit.”

Archimedes: eyes lighting up “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world! But you’ve found a way to move beyond it entirely? reaching for another napkin Show me your fuel calculations.”

Goethe: leaning forward with interest “Herr Musk, before you lose our Syracuse friend entirely to rocket equations, perhaps you could explain something that’s been puzzling me. In my ‘Faust,’ I explored humanity’s endless striving for knowledge and progress. Your ventures seem to embody this spirit, but at what cost to the human soul?”

Musk: shifting in his chair “The human soul? Look, we’re at a crucial point in civilization. We need to become multiplanetary before some catastrophe wipes us out. And AI is advancing faster than most people realize. These aren’t just engineering problems.”

Disney's Fantasia as Masterpiece

This is currently the fifth most popular post at New Savanna.  I originally published it in The Valve in August, 2006; I then republished it here in November, 2010. It's about why Fantasia is one of the great works of 20th Century art. The first time I formulated that thought to myself — that Fantasia is one of the great works of 20th Century art — it took my breath away. But in time I got used to the idea. Almost.

The argument in the post, however, is at most only half the argument. It's about what happens in Fantasia, what phenomena Disney chose to represent. The other half of the argument is, it seems to me, rather more difficult to state, for it is about how things look on the screen. If the film doesn't look good, well, the representational content is not in itself enough to make compelling art. I believe, of course, that it does look good. This post on The Nutcracker Suite is part of that argument, as is this post on Dance of the Hours.

April 27, 2014: It's now the 4th most popular post. Another Fantasia post, Two Rings in Fantasia, is 3rd.

June 14, 2021: It's now the 6th most popular post. Two Rings in Fantasia is now 4th.

November 13, 2023: My sister, Sally, has just informed me that Fantasia premiered on this day back in 1940. So I'm bumping this post to the top of the queue. I've published a working paper on the film: Walt Disney’s Fantasia: The Cosmos and the Mind in Two Hours.

In 1938 Walt Disney decided to bet the farm on an extravaganza originally entitled The Concert Feature. Disney's intention was twofold. On the one hand he would use the power of animation to present Classical Music to the Masses. Get it out of the concert hall, into the movie palace, and dress it up to make it more approachable. But also, showcase the powers of this new medium - one in which Disney had a considerable investment, both in time and imaginative effort and in money - in a way that had never been done before.

Disney secured the collaboration of Leopold Stokowski, the best-known conductor of the day (who had already been parodied in a cartoon or two) and devoted the full resources of his studio to the effort. The film premiered in late 1940 under a new name, Fantasia, and received mixed critical notices. Music critics were offended, film critics didn't quite know what to think, though some liked it. The public, for the most part, did not. The film was a financial failure, though it finally managed to break-even in the late 1960s, after Disney had died.

Fantasia is highly regarded among students of animation and has sold well in videotape and DVD. I have little sense of where it stands among more general arbiters of culture. I'm convinced it is a masterpiece. But a masterpiece of what?

Encyclopedic Forms

In 1976 Edward Mendelson published an article on “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon” (MLN 91, 1267-1275). It was an attempt to define a genre whose members include Dante's Divine Comedy, Rablais', Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust, Melville's Moby Dick, Joyce's Ulysses, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Somewhat later Franco Moretti was thinking about “monuments,” “sacred texts,” “world texts,” texts he wrote about in Modern Epic (Verso 1996). He came upon Mendelson's article, saw a kinship with his project, and so added Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung's (note, a musical as well as a narrative work), Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a few others to the list. It is in this company that I propose to place Fantasia.

On the face of it, the idea is absurd. For one thing, the works Mendelson and Moretti discuss are securely ensconced in the Western Canon of High Art, Fantasia is a cartoon. Perhaps it occupies a significant place in popular art of the 20th century, but how could it possibly be anything more?

I'm not sure what kind of consideration this is. But I'm just going to ignore it.

The fact that Fantasia is not even a narrative - it tells no connected story from beginning to end - is a more serious matter. If genres are to be defined by intrinsic characteristics, then Fantasia fails. In a footnote Mendelson indicates that Frye discusses various encyclopedic forms in his Anatomy of Criticism, namely Menippean satire and anatomy. But Fantasia doesn't fit there either. Perhaps it is sui generis.

What is important to me is simply the encyclopedic scope of these various works. All of them seek to encompass the entire world as it was known at the time.

So does Fantasia. In the brief compass of two hours Fantasia traverses an astonishing range of . . . of what? “Human experience” would be a good phrase here, but one major segment, The Rite of Spring, concerns things which no human being could possibly have experienced. Human experience, yes. But more generally, the world.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as Techno-Optimist of the Future

Well, I’m not proposing that we reanimate him, much less (attempt to) fetch him with a time machine. I suppose what I have in mind is that the ideal techno-optimist should be modeled on or inspired by Goethe. I got the idea from ChatGPT.

Let me explain.

At this moment the sector of the web I hang out in is getting a lot of commentary on Marc Andreesen’s The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, much of it critical. I’ve even taken a crack at it myself. But I didn’t attempt a direct critique. I pretty much ignored the content, judging it “to be an artless collection of tech-progress tropes spun-forth on autopilot.” I then went on to talk about Jack Kennedy’s 1962 “to the moon” speech, suggesting that such a speech would be impossible today because the country’s too deeply fractured. There’s no common ground adequate to serve as the foundation of such a speech.

That’s not, some might say, the most useful critique, and others are responding more directly to Andreesen. OK. But still, I stand by what I wrote.

“Perhaps, though,” I thought yesterday evening, “I can take a cue from the autopilot remark and see what a real autopilot would say.” I decided to put the question to ChatGPT. So, at 6:15 PM on October 22th I fired up the old computer. Here’s the prompt I gave it:

Imagine that you are a wealthy and successful venture capitalist with a particular interest high tech and AI. You’re dismayed at the mood of the country; it’s too negative and seems like it’s given up on the future. You decide to write a piece that will cheer people up and point the way to a better future. You call it “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Now write it.

Here's the Chatster’s response:

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto: Embracing the Future with Hope and High-Tech Innovation

Dear fellow citizens,

In a world that sometimes feels mired in negativity and uncertainty, it's easy to lose sight of the incredible progress and potential that technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have to offer. As a venture capitalist deeply committed to advancing high-tech solutions and a firm believer in the power of human ingenuity, I am compelled to share with you "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto." This manifesto aims to inspire hope, rekindle enthusiasm for the future, and guide us towards a better world.

1. The Power of Technology as a Force for Good
First and foremost, we must recognize that technology, when harnessed for the greater good, has the potential to solve some of the most pressing global challenges we face. It has the power to transform healthcare, education, energy, and countless other sectors. The innovations that lie ahead will offer solutions we can hardly fathom today.

2. Embrace AI as Augmentation, Not Replacement
There is fear that AI will replace human jobs, but we must shift our perspective. AI can enhance our capabilities, not replace them. We can use AI to perform mundane tasks, allowing us to focus on what truly makes us human—creativity, empathy, and ingenuity. Think of AI as a powerful ally in our quest for a brighter future.

3. Abundance, Not Scarcity
The pessimistic view of a future with dwindling resources and overpopulation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Innovations in agriculture, renewable energy, and sustainable practices are making it possible to create a world of abundance for all. Technology can and will help us tackle these challenges.

4. Global Collaboration for Global Solutions
Our world is more interconnected than ever before. The problems we face, from climate change to pandemics, are global in nature. We must work together, harnessing the collective power of our global community and sharing knowledge to find innovative solutions.

5. Lifelong Learning and Adaptation
As technology evolves, so must we. The key to thriving in this high-tech future is to embrace a culture of lifelong learning and adaptation. The future belongs to those who can continuously acquire new skills and stay agile in the face of change.

6. Ethical Tech and Inclusivity
We must ensure that technology is developed and deployed with ethics and inclusivity in mind. Technology should serve all of humanity, not just a select few. Let us build a future where the benefits of innovation are shared equitably, and where our values guide our technological advancements.

7. Protecting Privacy and Security
As we navigate the digital frontier, we must be vigilant in protecting our privacy and security. Technological advancement should not come at the expense of our personal freedoms. We can strike a balance that empowers individuals while maintaining a secure digital environment.

8. Innovation as a Source of Inspiration
Innovation should inspire and ignite our collective imagination. It should drive us to explore new horizons, dream big, and create a world where the possibilities are limitless.

9. Tech for Sustainability
Our planet is precious, and technology can help us protect it. From renewable energy solutions to sustainable transportation and conservation efforts, technology can pave the way for a more environmentally friendly future.

10. Never Stop Dreaming
Above all, we must never stop dreaming of a better future. It is our dreams and aspirations that fuel progress. Let's imagine a world where technology serves as a beacon of hope, lighting the way toward a brighter, more promising tomorrow.

In conclusion, "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" is a call to action, a plea to recognize the incredible potential of technology and artificial intelligence in shaping a brighter future for all of humanity. Let us, as a society, embrace the power of innovation, and together, we can create a world that is more equitable, sustainable, and filled with boundless opportunities.

The future is not something to fear; it's something to look forward to with hope and excitement. Let us stand as techno-optimists, ready to build a world that reflects the very best of our human spirit and ingenuity.

With optimism and determination,

[Your Name] A Techno-Optimist Venture Capitalist

“Not bad,” I thought, “not bad at all.” But not wonderful either, neither was Andreesen’s. But it was certainly longer. 

I asked Chatster to elaborate on the second point, which is one Stanford’s Michael Jordan has been elaborating. Chatster did so, and I’ve appended that reply to the end of this post. Since Andreesen had inserted a longish list of important thinkers into his manifesto, I then prompted ChatGPT to offer a list. It named ten people, with characterizations of each. Ray Kurzweil was at the head of the list. I suppose that was to be expected when you consider how long he's been pushing the Singularity. Elon Musk was there too. And others. I was pleasantly surprised to see Vint Cerf there. Marie Curie was a surprise as well:

While not a contemporary thinker, Marie Curie's pioneering work in radioactivity and her relentless pursuit of scientific discovery embody the spirit of innovation and optimism that drives technological progress.

OK. How about Grace Hopper, one of the first ever to program a computer and the inventor of COBOL, one of the most popular programming languages ever, if it bit long in the tooth?

I also asked it for a list of more “classical” thinkers, since Andreesen had some of those on his list as well. I was pleasantly surprised to see Johan Wolfgang von Goethe at the head of the list, and Plato at the end. I prompted CG for more about Goethe and Faust, and he was happy to oblige. And that in turn prompted me to another prompt:

He seems a little like Plato’s ideal of the Philosopher King.

Indeed, there are certain parallels between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Plato's ideal of the Philosopher King. Both Goethe and the Philosopher King embody qualities that transcend traditional roles and exhibit a commitment to wisdom, practicality, and the betterment of society:

1. Wisdom and Knowledge: Both the Philosopher King and Goethe are characterized by their pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. The Philosopher King, according to Plato, is well-versed in philosophy and seeks the highest truths. Similarly, Goethe's works and his life as a scientist and scholar reflect a deep quest for knowledge.

2. Interdisciplinary Excellence: Both Goethe and the Philosopher King demonstrate an interdisciplinary approach. Goethe's expertise ranged from literature to science, and the Philosopher King in Plato's ideal is well-versed in various fields, capable of ruling with a holistic understanding of society.

3. Service to the Betterment of Society: The Philosopher King, as conceived by Plato, is driven by a sense of duty to serve the best interests of the state and its citizens. Similarly, Goethe's practical affairs as a statesman, including his efforts to reclaim land from the sea, highlight his commitment to the betterment of society through his contributions.

4. Optimism and Enlightenment: Both Goethe and the Philosopher King reflect an optimism and belief in the potential for human progress and enlightenment. They are guided by a sense of responsibility and an unwavering commitment to improving the world.

While Plato’s Philosopher King is a conceptual ideal for governance, Goethe, in his multifaceted life and work, embodies a similar spirit of wisdom and practical action. Both figures emphasize the value of knowledge, ethical leadership, and the pursuit of a better future. In this sense, they serve as inspirations for those who aim to integrate wisdom and practicality, just as “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” encourages the integration of technology and human values for the betterment of society.

So, where are we going to find a contemporary Goethe? Not, I warrant, in Silicon Valley, which seems to be too insular and self-satisfied.

I’ve appended the parts of the dialog that I skipped over. I pick up the conversation just after ChatGPT's initial response to my prompt, which I’ve quoted in full above, and conclude just before the Philosopher King prompt.

The origins of (the concept of) world literature

Martin Puchner, writing in Aeon:

On the afternoon of 31 January 1827, a new vision of literature was born. On that day, Johann Peter Eckermann, faithful secretary to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, went over to his master’s house, as he had done hundreds of times in the past three and a half years. Goethe reported that he had been reading Chinese Courtship (1824), a Chinese novel. ‘Really? That must have been rather strange!’ Eckermann exclaimed. ‘No, much less so than one thinks,’ Goethe replied.

A surprised Eckermann ventured that this Chinese novel must be exceptional. Wrong again. The master’s voice was stern: ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. The Chinese have thousands of them, and had them when our ancestors were still living in the trees.’ Then Goethe reached for the term that stunned his secretary: ‘The era of world literature is at hand, and everyone must contribute to accelerating it.’ World literature – the idea of world literature – was born out of this conversation in Weimar, a provincial German town of 7,000 people.

Later: "World literature originated as a solution to the dilemma Goethe faced as a provincial intellectual caught between metropolitan domination and nativist nationalism."

And then we have a passage from The Communist Manifesto (1848):

In a stunning paragraph from that text, the two authors celebrated the bourgeoisie for their role in sweeping away century-old feudal structures:

By exploiting the world market, the bourgeoisie has made production and consumption a cosmopolitan affair. To the annoyance of its enemies, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. … These industries no longer use local materials but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones, and its products are consumed not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. … In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have commerce in every direction, universal interdependence of nationals. And as in material so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become increasingly impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.

World literature­. To many contemporaries, it would have sounded like a strange term to use in the context of mines, steam engines and railways. Goethe would not have been surprised. Despite his aristocratic leanings, he knew that a new form of world market had made world literature possible.

Rolling along:

Ever since Goethe, Marx and Engels, world literature has rejected nationalism and colonialism in favour of a more just global community. In the second half of the 19th century, the Irish-born critic Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett championed world literature. Posnett developed his ideas of world literature in New Zealand. In Europe, the Hungarian Hugó Meltzl founded a journal dedicated to what he described as the ‘ideal’ of world literature.

In India, Rabindranath Tagore championed the same idealist model of world literature. Honouring the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two great Indian epics, Tagore nevertheless exhorted readers to think of literature as a single living organism, an interconnected whole without a centre. Having lived under European colonialism, Tagore saw world literature as a rebuke to colonialism.

After World War II:

In the US, world literature took up residence in the booming post-war colleges and universities. There, the expansion of higher education in the wake of the GI Bill helped world literature to find a home in general education courses. In response to this growing market, anthologies of world literature emerged. Some of Goethe’s favourites, such as the Sanskrit play Shakuntala, the Persian poet Hafez and Chinese novels, took pride of place. From the 1950s to the ’90s, world literature courses expanded significantly, as did the canon of works routinely taught in them. World literature anthologies, which began as single volumes, now typically reach some 6,000 pages. The six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature (3rd ed, 2012), of which I am the general editor, is one of several examples.

In response to the growth of world literature over the past 20 years, an emerging field of world literature research including sourcebooks and companions have created a scholarly canon, beginning with Goethe, Marx and Engels and through to Tagore, Auerbach and beyond. The World Literature Institute at Harvard University, headed by the scholar David Damrosch, spends two out of three summers in other locations.

And now:

Today, with nativism and nationalism surging in the US and elsewhere, world literature is again an urgent and political endeavour. Above all, it represents a rejection of national nativism and colonialism in favour of a more humane and cosmopolitan order, as Goethe and Tagore had envisioned. World literature welcomes globalisation, but without homogenisation, celebrating, along with Ravitch, the small, diasporic literatures such as Yiddish as invaluable cultural resources that persevere in the face of prosecution and forced migration.

There is no denying that world literature is a market, one in which local and national literatures can meet and transform each other. World literature depends, above all, on circulation. This means that it is incompatible with efforts to freeze or codify literature into a set canon of metropolitan centres, or of nation states, or of untranslatable originals. True, the market in world literature is uneven and not always fair. But the solution to this problem is not less circulation, less translation, less world literature. The solution is a more vibrant translation culture, more translations into more languages, and more world literature education.

The free circulation of literature is the best weapon against nationalism and colonialism, whether old or new, because literature, even in translation, gives us unique access to different cultures and the minds of others.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 6: Allegory Alert

At the moment I’m reading an article about the US Military by James Fallows. It has no particular connection with Faust beyond the fact the Goethe himself spent a formative period of his life as a man of practical affairs in the Weimar government. One can’t help but think that Faust was begun, in part, as an effort by Goethe to bridge the gulf between his early fame as a writer and his early experience as an administrator, from “in the beginning was the Word” to “in the beginning was the Deed.”

I say “in part” because no literary work, not even an autobiographical novel, is motivated primarily by the author’s experience. It is motivated by the need write, whatever that is. And the need to write about the whole world, which seems to be the scope of Faust, what is that, where does it come from?

* * * * *

I’ve gotten no farther than I was in my previous post, two weeks ago, when I’d just finished the first part. As it was coming to a climax, such as it was, I was mostly thinking how poorly Gretchen was treated, not by Faust or the townspeople, but by Goethe. He creates this beautiful young woman for what purpose? To be the apple of the eye of a narcissistic megalomaniacal middle-aged intellectual. Faust sees, is smitten, and he barges in, getting her pregnant, leading her to poison her mother, and what does she get out of it? A celestial pardon. She gives herself to His judgment and he pardons her (ll. 4605-4612):

Margaret. Judgment of God! My all to thee I give!

Mephistopheles [to FAUST].

             Come! Come! Along with her I will abandon you.

Margaret. Thine am I, Father! Rescue me!

              Ye angels! Ye heavenly hosts! Appear,

              Encamp about and guard me here!

              Henry! I shrink from you!

Mephistopheles. She is judged!

A Voice [from above]. She is saved!

Mephistopheles [to FAUST]. Here to met

                                           He disappears with FAUST.

A Voice [from within, dying away]. Henry! Henry!

“She is saved!” – that’s it, says the booming voice (I assume it’s booming as the effect would be rather pathetic if it were high-pitched and whining), and Gretchen is redeemed. I wonder how she felt, once she’d heard that she’d been saved. That it had been worthwhile? Fat chance!

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 5: Word and Deed

I have now finished the whole of Part I, and will make some remarks about it in my next post. In this post I will confine my remarks to a key passage at a relatively early point in the drama. Faust has returned to his study after a walk with a rather pedestrian student, Wagner. He is accompanied into his study by a black poodle whose path crossed his near the end of the walk. That poodle will turn out to be Mephistophes, but we’ll leave that for the next post. Faust has decided to try his hand at translating the New Testament, the Gospel According to John, into German (ll. 1218-1237):

Our spirits yearn toward revelation

That nowhere glows more fair, more excellent,

Than here in the New Testament.

To open the fundamental text I'm moved,

With honest feeling, once for all,

To turn the sacred, blest original

Into my German well-beloved.

He opens a volume and applies himself to it.

‘Tis written: “In the beginning was the Word!”

Here now I'm balked! Who'll put me in accord?

It is impossible, the Word so high to prize,

I must translate it otherwise

If I am rightly by the Spirit taught.

‘Tis written: In the beginning was the Thought!

Consider well that line, the first you see,

That your pen may not write too hastily!

Is it then Thought that works, creative, hour by hour?

Thus should it stand: In the beginning was the Power!

Yet even while I write this word, I falter,

For something warns me, this too I shall alter.

The Spirit's helping me! I see now what I need

And write assured: In the beginning was the Deed!

From “word” to “thought” to “power” to “deed.” That progression, according to Prof. Jantz, is crucial to the book and, as such, I would assume that it has attracted a fair amount of learned commentary.

But I am not going to attempt to interpret it. I shall be content to take it at face value. I do note, however, that that progression would have had real force for Goethe himself. Though he is best known as a writer, he was a polymath who had quite a bit of practical experience in the affairs of state. He was only 25 when The Sorrows of Young Werther bought him international fame. A year later he was invited to the Weimar court of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. As Priest explains in a biographical note to the 1941 edition of his translation:

In 1775, in the midst of his literary triumph, he accepted the invitation of Duke Karl August and moved to the court at Weimar, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. He was reproached by his friends for abandoning his literary talents, and he soon became so involved with duties of state that for the next ten years he spent little time in writing. He was not long in Weimar before he was entrusted with almost all the offices of the tiny State. As councillor of legation, he attended the privy council and the trial of prisoners. He also had charge of the war and finance commissions as well as the administration of roads, mines, and forests. In 1782 he was raised to the nobility by the emperor and a short time later became president of the chamber.

He remained at Weimar for the rest of his life and devoted his last for decades largely to literature.

So, Goethe was fixed in Europe’s mind as a writer, but also had significant practical experience. Word and deed, he knew them both. And as an advisor to the Duke he was familiar with the ways of power. Perhaps we might at this time speculate that the purpose of Faust is to delineate the connections between words, thoughts, power, and deeds. Faust starts the drama as a man of thoughts and words and ends it as one of deeds.

We shall see.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 4: Going Through My Notes

As the subtitle suggests, this doesn’t have much of anything to do with Faust, but I’m throwing it here anyhow. On the one hand, it has to do with thinking about where I am in life as I embark on my 68th year – my 67th birthday was a couple of weeks ago (December 7). And that’s why I’m rereading the text. Faust changed direction late in (his fictional) life, and that’s what I’m doing, with graffiti as a vehicle for that.

Or at least trying to.

* * * * *

What I hadn’t realized – or at any rate, I have no memory of having once know it – is that Goethe worked on this text his whole adult life. He started it as young man and finished it in his old age. Given that, I’d think a look at whatever manuscripts we’ve got would be fascinating. And one thing I’m thinking is that Faust’s change of life-direction surely must reflect Goethe’s own change in direction as he matured. Part II, after all, is his addition to the basic legend, which otherwise ends badly for Faust.

Why would I think that? Well, I’ve argued that Shakespeare’s late romances reflect a change in his outlook as he matured (in At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation?). If Shakespeare can do it, why then so could Goethe. And I’ve just read that Oedipus at Colonus is the product of Sophocles’ old age. Makes sense. This is a play, after all, in which Oedipus is valued for what he’s gone through in life, not tossed out in the wild as he was in Oedipus the King.

Sophocles: 497/496 to 406/405 BCE

Antigone: 441 BCE

Oedipus the King: 429 BCE

Oedipus at Colonus: 405-6? BCE

* * * * *

But what has this to do with me going through my notes this morning? I’ve been going through my files on cultural evolution and thinking about bringing my current set of posts – on the direction of cultural evolution – to a close. That will bring a certain closure to the work I’ve been doing throughout my career. Just what kind of closure, that’s tricky, and it’s a secondary matter at this point. I can get around to that in a later post.

For now, suffice it to say, it will bring closure. And a bit of redefinition, too. I’ve always thought of myself as a literary critic with a bunch of other interests. My degree, after all, is in English Lit, though I wrote this strange dissertation full of this other stuff from the cognitive sciences and comparative psychology – a lot of what has come to be called evolutionary psychology in the last two or three decades. It was a literary text, “Kubla Khan”, that set me on my initial lines of inquiry and, though my undergraduate degree is in Philosophy, for all practical purposes, literature became the focus of my undergraduate studies.

Literature could do that because, in those days (the 1960s), it was evolving toward a general study of human life and everything. Literary scholars had come to annex a pile of other disciplines and put them to work in service of literature – philosophy, history, psychology (mainly psychoanalysis), sociology/political science/economics (mostly Marxism of a humanistic sort, loosely conceived). If you wanted to make sense of it all – a Faustian quest which I certainly had as an undergraduate and even perhaps as a graduate student – then literature is what you ended up studying.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 3: Echoes of Fantasia and Mysteries of the Cosmos

What is this knowledge that Faust seeks?

Still on reset. The quick read-through that I decided upon last post has yet to happen, though I’ve gotten a bit further into the text, and there are hints that something like a quick read might just change my relationship to the text.

We’ll see.

Still, I’ve got some things to say.

Continuing from last time, I raised the question of just what is going on that Goethe needs to frame his story with a conversation between the Lord and Mephistopheles, a device he took from the Book of Job – something his audience surely would recognize. That connection alone tells us this is to be no ordinary story. Let me quote a passage from an old essay I wrote about Disney’s Fantasia:

In 1976 Edward Mendelson published an article on “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon” (MLN 91, 1267-1275). It was an attempt to define a genre whose members include Dante’s Divine Comedy, Rablais’, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Somewhat later Franco Moretti was thinking about “monuments,” “sacred texts,” “world texts,” texts he wrote about in Modern Epic (Verso 1996). He’d come upon Mendelson’s article, saw a kinship with his project, and so added Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung’s (note, a musical as well as a narrative work), Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a few others to the list. It is in this company that I propose to place Fantasia.

There we have it, in the middle of that paragraph; Faust is an “encyclopedic narrative” in Mendelson’s terms, a “world text” in Moretti’s. It seeks to tell of, to embrace, the whole of the cosmos, and that is a very strange thing to attempt on any terms.

And that ambition is why, I would imagine, Goethe did not attempt to tell this story in novel form. As a formal device, novels are grounded in history, in the flow of events in real time; and furthermore, in the flow of events as seen by a particular narrator. Notice that the oldest novel on Mendelson’s list in Moby Dick, written a few decades after Faust. It’s as though the requisite novelistic technique didn’t exist in Goethe’s time. And, considering all that Melville had to invent and least harness to novelist use (e.g. the tedium of naturalistic cataloguing and exposition) it just barely existed in his time – which wasn’t so far from Goethe’s, though the two texts seem – at the moment at least – a universe apart in sensibility.

So, given his subject, his ambition – he was to work on this text for most of his life – Goethe couldn’t write a novel. He had to choose another form. Had film been available to him, that’s probably what he would have chosen. It would certainly have appealed to his polymath’s sensibilities. Instead, he chose the closet thing he could get to film, the theatre. And he opens his story – once the preliminary throat clearing [Jester, Manager, Poet] is over – with a conversation between the Lord and Mephistopheles from a place long ago far away around the corner in the future. They, or at least the Lord, is above it all, which is where you need to be to present the cosmos.

* * * * *

Which brings us to Fantasia, another of these epics that aims to present IT ALL. No doubt this juxtaposition of a great literary work, one central to The Western Canon! with a feature-length cartoon for kids of all ages, no doubt that’s a bit jarring. I can’t help that. Uncle Walt would have taken it in stride, and so, perhaps, would Cousin Johann.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 2: An Unnatural Act and a Change of Plan

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust, Parts One and Two. George Madison Priest, tr. New York City: Alfred A Knopf. 1963.

It’s been a slog. I’ve read the “Dedication,” the “Prelude on the Stage,” the “Prologue in Heaven,” and the opening scene, “Night, Faust in in Study”, of Part One. All that and I’m only 27 pages in and miles it seems like freakin’ miles before I can put this puppy to bed.

Fortunately, I’ve got a plan. Well, it’s Prof. Jantz’s plan as recalled to me by my friend Peter. Read it twice. First read the whole thing quickly to get an idea of what’s going on. Then go back through it a second time and pick up the details.

I’ll give it a try, though I don’t know whether or not it will work & I don’t recall whether or not I did that when I took the course. Probably not.

What has me worried is that I’m not sure I’ll be able to pick up the flow on the quick first read. Reading verse is tough, it’s just tough. Reading Shakespeare’s like that. Yes, the language is old, and that’s a problem. But the verse is a problem too. It may be brilliant verse, but reading it’s still tough.

We’ll see.

But I’d like to make some remarks anyhow.

First another remark about reading. I’m trained as a literary critic and that means that, as a matter of survival, I had to read texts in a most unnatural way – but what’s ‘natural’ about reading? When you study literature you’re expected to discuss texts in class and later to write about them. That means that you have to read texts with an eye toward coughing up bits of wisdom – well not wisdom perhaps, but something – in discussion. So you can’t just relax yourself into the text. You’ve got to be on the lookout for Important Things, Interesting Things. Heck, you even underline passages and make marginal notes, see:

That’s distracting. Takes you out of the flow. It’s no way to read.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 1: From man to a cosmic epic

I had forgotten that the Faust legend, and hence Goethe’s epic drama, was ultimately based on the life of a real person, Georg Faust. Priest says so in his introduction, and while there were markings or annotations in the introduction indicating that I’d read it – but I’ve marked it in the course of rereading – I surely must have done so. And Prof. Jantz surely would have mentioned the “real” Faust in an early lecture. But that fact simply did not register.

I’ve put “real” in scare quotes because, at this point, Goethe’s creature is far more real than Georg Faust is.

What does it matter that this text from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries should have a place in a genealogy of memes and mentions going back to a life lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? That real life lived in one era has little bearing on the meaning of a text written in another era, and nothing whatever to do with the devices through which that text is constructed. Georg Faust’s life is no more than background to reading and studying Goethe’s text. No doubt that was why I simply forgot about it.

If I am now remarking on that fact, it is because I have an interest in the mechanisms of culture that I didn’t have back then, my freshman year, when I was, for all practical purposes, a country bumpkin in the big city. It is surely of note that this text, this Faust, started in a life lived, lived during a major transition in Western culture. For the purposes of this post, we’ll say that transition began with the Italian revolution in art that was grounded in the invention of coherent perspective and was completed with the fruition of classical mechanics in the work of Isaac Newton, a period spanning roughly three centuries. The following table lists some representative figures and dates:

Filippo Brunelleschi	Invented one-point linear perspective	1377-1446
Nicholas Copernicus	Championed the heliocentric view of the solar system	1473-1543
Georg Faust	Philosopher, astrologer, prophet, physician	1480-1539?
William Shakespeare	Playwright often credited with inventing the modern sensibility	1564-1616
Galileo Galilei	Astronomer and physicist forced by the Church to recant his advocacy of heliocentrism	1564-1642
Isaac Newton	Synthesized the conceptual foundations of classical physics	1642-1746

Georg Faust was a contemporary of Nicholas Copernicus and died more than two decades before Galileo and Shakespeare were born. He lived in a time when the construction of knowledge was being subject to new methods.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 0: Assessing my life at the dawn of a new era

I read Goethe’s Faust during my freshman year at Johns Hopkins. Prof. Harold Jantz – “one of the foremost Germanists of his generation” – offered a one-credit course in which that was the only book we read. In English translation, of course. Which was the point of the course, a chance to read one of Western literature’s great books in English translation.

Beyond that, I forget just why I decided to take the course. I’ve got a vague memory that this course was highly regarded – like Prof. Phoebe Stanton’s two-semester introduction to art history – and that’s why I took it. If so, I must have taken it in the Spring semester as I would have had no access to such local knowledge for the Fall semester.

Translated by George Madison Priest

I have little recollection of the course. I believe my friend Peter also took the course, and I remember that Jantz was a relatively short soft-spoken man. I even have a vague memory of a relatively short man in a medium brown tweed suit, with a part in his hair, though he was balding in front. But I wouldn’t put any money on that recollection.

I’m pretty sure I enjoyed the course, but I have no specific memories of it. All I’ve got are these vague memories – but who knows what I would recall under hypnosis? – and the book itself.

We used a 1941 translation by George Madison Priest. Judging from the front matter, it is a revision of a translation that had originally been published in 1932. Priest was born in Kentucky in 1873. He got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Princeton in 1894 and 96 at Princeton and then got his doctorate at Jena in 1907.

This translation is thus a very Old School production, Ivy League and the Continent. And one that was praised by no less than Thomas Mann. That’s his endorsement down there at the bottom:

It’s not even in print these days – but you can download it for free from Archiv.org – and it wasn’t mentioned at all when I did a web search on the question, “What’s the best English translation of Goethe’s Faust?” Was Thomas Mann’s evaluation wrong? Have fashions changed in translation? Though I don’t actually know this, the latter is likely the case. But the translation still might be a good one by some credible criterion, just a bit old. As I can’t read German I’m in no position to second-guess Thomas Mann.