Search Results

This chapter takes a close look at Hanslick's writings published after his abandonment of Austrian Herbartianism in the mid-1860s. It argues that Hanslick, after producing a Hegelian history of Viennese musical life in 1869, soon rejected Hegel's philosophy of history as well, and spent his remaining thirty-four years elaborating a novel and avowedly subjective historiography of music that placed the experiences of the listening subject at the center of the historical narrative. Examining the contents of his resulting twelve books, which he collectively called a “living history” of Viennese concert life, the chapter suggests that the latter project constituted Hanslick's contribution to a broad and diffuse movement among some late-century historians and philosophers—including Nietzsche, Windelband, and Jacob Burckhardt—who questioned the pretense to objectivity in the work of their positivist colleagues and insisted upon the inherently subjective nature of all historical observations.

The original Humboldtian ideal of Bildung was modified in the early 19th century by the growth of disciplinary specialization and of natural science and medicine. But the Berlin model of university organization retained high prestige, and was widely adopted (and adapted) elsewhere, first in southern Germany and Austria, later in Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and Scandinavia. In Britain, there were different ideals of liberal education at Oxford and Cambridge and in Scotland. Newman's lectures on The Idea of a University, a classic expression of the notion of the liberally educated gentleman, were based on his early experience at Oxford. Matthew Arnold had similar ideas, and this chapter compares his ideal of culture with the writings of Ernest Renan in France and Jacob Burckhardt in Switzerland. All saw the materialist spirit of industrial society as a danger which university culture needed to counteract.

This chapter covers Gu”non’s biography from a series of disasters in 1927–28 that led to his emigration to Egypt in 1930 until the start of the Second World War. It examines Gu”non’s life in Egypt and the nature of his conversion to Islam, and the impact of Egypt and Islam on Traditionalism. As well as lying behind future developments in French Freemasonry, this impact resulted in the formation of two Traditionalist religious groups, one short-lived and Catholic and one long-lived and Islamic, a European branch of an Algerian Sufi order--the Alawiyya--under Frithjof Schuon, assisted by Titus Burckhardt. The chapter covers Schuon’s biography and the history of his Alawiyya up to 1943.

In Joseph Cornell’s New York films from the 1950s, documentary forms shift between realism and symbolism, materiality and mystery. This chapter emphasizes several converging critical contexts for the study of these films: firstly, the visual – especially, photographic – culture in New York in the 1950s, a culture that included Cornell, even if he did not, officially, belong to any of its coteries; secondly, the people he worked with on these films, especially his collaborations with Rudy Burckhardt and Stan Brakhage, and their respective connections to the New York School, and the city’s burgeoning avant-garde scene; thirdly, how – in formal terms – Cornell’s films from the 1950s relate to his other art work, especially, the boxes, assemblages, the collage-montage films of the 1930s, and his artistic vision, more generally; and finally, the relevance of these films to a broader discussion on documentary practice, and its relation to the modern visual arts.

This chapter examines the key authors and texts that provided conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism with a distinctive aristocratic character: its paternalism, its scepticism about democracy, its discomfort with the commercial aspects of capitalism, and its belief in a hierarchy of ability. From their interwar origins, conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism were about more than the economic order. They were fundamentally about the kind of social and cultural order that was appropriate to a sustainable liberal society and that would stem the crisis of moral and intellectual values. Referencing of canonical texts with which the cultivated bourgeois intelligentsia was familiar had the additional value of endowing conservative liberals and Ordo-liberals with prestige. This chapter examines the most cited authors and texts in this literature: Lord John Acton, Julien Benda, Jacob Burckhardt, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gustave Le Bon, Frédéric Le Play, José Ortega y Gasset, Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, and Alexis de Tocqueville. It also looks at Friedrich Hayek’s attempt to establish the Acton-Tocqueville Society. These authors embodied a faith in an aristocracy of knowledge, a distrust of plebeian culture, and a belief in the quality of the inner life and in character as the foundation of a liberal society. Aristocratic liberalism rested on two fears: of unbridled democracy and of the despotic state; of anarchy and servitude. The chapter closes with reflections on the changing fortunes of aristocratic liberalism and their implication for conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism.

Following the failed Napoleonic Expedition and a period of turmoil in Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha established an unprecedented level of order in Egypt that facilitated travel to Egypt and study of the land to an unprecedented degree. Several scholars took advantage of the opportunity. The consuls-general Henry Salt and Bernardino Drovetti exploited their positions for commercial collecting of antiquities on a vast scale that enriched the collections of European museums. Individual travellers like William John Bankes and Johann Ludwig Burckhardt were able to survey Egyptian antiquities and make new discoveries. The former circus strongman Giovanni Battista Belzoni performed prodigious feats of exploration and collection. The way was opened for yet more scholarly investigation of Egypt.

The values widely recognized and voiced during the Renaissance period were part of the inherited and continuous Christian tradition, whereas others were reinforced by key aspects of classical revival, especially by Stoicism and Platonism. These values include: reason, patience, moderation of anger, rejection of materialism, the superiority of the spiritual over the physical, and a need for humility. This chapter introduces the texts found during what the book calls The Unrepentant Renaissance that possibly praise the values and qualities that are the exact opposite of those just mentioned. The chapter thus gives an introduction to Jacob Burckhardt by going through his views of the culture of the period. It’s Burckhardt’s text that gives description to the experience of the period “in which it was possible to regard enjoyment of the things of this world as something not clearly negative and even, at times, as praiseworthy.”

Influenced by Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Warburg promoted a radically new understanding of how the Renaissance inherited a more complex aesthetic heritage from classical antiquity. Yet in the spirit of the cultural historian Karl Lamprecht, Warburg also wished to create an interdisciplinary methodology that would permit him to analyze this process in a holistic way. The second chapter argues that Warburg’s prewar writings on Botticelli and Ghirlandaio reveals how he took certain tropes from his mercantile home city, including, most notably the merchant, the widow, and the amateur “private scholar,” to develop a new portrait of Renaissance art and its social milieu. His approach, which connected perennial problems of form and content, and genius and predefined classical tropes, with the observation of a single detail, captured in such concepts as the Nachleben der Antike and the pathosformel, would become his greatest intellectual contribution to art history.

Elaine married Willem de Kooning on December 9, 1943, and they began living in an industrial loft that he had refurbished. He taught her to paint still lifes, and she also began drawing New York streetscapes and painting portraits. The de Koonings’ circle included photographer Rudy Burckhardt, poet and critic Edwin Denby, and painters Arshile Gorky and Joop Sanders. Scraping by with odd jobs—Elaine modeled, Bill worked on commercial art projects—the couple ate meals at cafeterias where artists congregated. Hunger was pervasive in those days, when no one’s work was selling. While Bill spent nights painting, Elaine preferred going out on the town. She had no interest in cooking or other “wifely” tasks, and was sometimes unfaithful. But they put a good face on their disagreements and both became active members of the Club, the artists’ gathering place, where Elaine’s vitality and intelligence took center stage.

This chapter analyzes Karl Löwith's literal translation of religious contents into politics. Löwith wrote Meaning in History (1949) to critique the notion of progress and its relation to Christian eschatology. Although his thinking was shared by many theorists during the 1940s and 1950s, his work was not systematically criticized. Meaning and History also focused on Jacob Burckhardt's view of history, interpreting it as the “soundest modern reflection of history,” because he understands both classical and Christian positions without committing to either of them. Paradoxically, Löwith's work survives mainly because of his ideas about literal translation. But he failed to make clear why the pagan view of history provides a better perspective for a philosophy of history related to politics.

"The Myth of Absence,” traces the myth that the philosophes and the mechanistic cosmology had eliminated the divine. It demonstrates that several key mythemes—the mythless age, the de-divination of nature, nihilism, and the death of God—had a conjoined genesis in German philosophical circles several decades before Nietzsche. Focusing on the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Jacobi, and Friedrich Schiller, it shows how a generation of German philosophers came to believe that they lived in a uniquely mythless epoch and then transmitted this particular lament to later generations, including our own. Turning to Jacob Burckhardt, it shows how the myth-of-the-end-of-myth was projected backward, producing the historiography of other epochs, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment

This chapter offers a “substantive” reflection on the making of history by connecting the notion that “novelty”—or discontinuity—springs from the dehors texte with Jacob Burckhardt's intuition that we have become, and continue to become, what we are in an endless series of Verpuppungen (metamorphoses). To this end, it considers one particular metamorphosis: the way Vladimir Ilyich Lenin succeeded in bringing off the Russian Revolution. In particular, it explores Lenin's capacity to recreate contexts “in his image and likeness” in relation to the concept of “somnambulistic clairvoyance.” It first discusses Leon Trotsky's observation that the revolution was a cascade of improvisations and that Lenin owed his success to his “imagination.” It then examines what complexity looks like at the level of the species by using an axiom: that the best way to complicate a situation is to try to simplify it by throwing all cautions to the wind and fleeing forward. It also looks at the notion of inventio, as opposed to imaginatio, in connection with the Russian Revolution.

This chapter discusses the topographical landscape of the fifteenth century and the so-called world landscape of the early sixteenth century as exemplified in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. It shows how Lorenzetti’s vision is distinct from the “topocosmos” of the Middle Ages, as shown in the study of the history of the pictorial imagination. In Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Jacob Burckhardt coined the memorable phrase “all foreground without distance” that applies to the visual conventions used to represent nature and landscape in the pictorial arts of the Middle Ages. However, there can be no landscape without a horizon in the distance; therefore, the discovery of perspective becomes the sole criterion for the development of landscape painting.

How did an ancient commonplace proposing correspondence between a writer’s character and his words transform during early modernity into a dynamic and widely practiced method of textual interpretation? The Introduction traces this development back to the confluence of two currents of textual practice. First, European readers and writers lavished heightened attention on the topic of personal character, coincident with what Burckhardt identified as the cult of “die Persönlichkeit” and including an emergent interest in the personalities and life stories of artists and writers. Second, humanist reading communities began to intensify their already profound investment in fiction as an instrument of knowledge, through its use not only as an object of study but now also as a modality integral to the process of interpretation. To capture such fiction’s historically distinctive affiliation with the act of construing texts rather than composing them, this chapter coins the term critical fiction.

Chapter 2 presents the question of the unconscious in the context of the history of nineteenth-century German reflection on the encounter between moderns and ancients. The Hegelian dialectic of negation and preservation serves to unpack the received, modified memory of antiquity. In contrast to the common nineteenth-century view that regards classical antiquity as humanity’s remote childhood—its primordial past—Hegel’s notion of antiquity emphasizes rather its connectedness to present circumstances. For Hegel, the memory of antiquity is part of the present and therefore has a formative influence on the openness of modern consciousness to its future.

In the nineteenth century the general trend was away from grand comparative stadial theories and towards particularist accounts. The dominant historical rationale of the age was History as Identity, specifically national Identity. The first section of this chapter addresses the political context of so much historical thought across the Continent, with the French Revolution and its aftershocks prominent. The second section focuses on the main trends of the influential German historiography. At the same time, there were challenges to the prevailing German model of historiography even in its heyday: challenges in the 1860s are examined in the third section. Given the grand fluctuations in German political fortunes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the accompanying turmoil in historical philosophy, Germany also features quite heavily in most of the remaining sections of the chapter. Here we examine how the particularizing, relativizing, tendency of a brand of historical thought turned in upon itself from around 1870, as some of the certainties of the nation-through-history were undermined by the effects of modernization and world conflict, and the social function of the historian became the subject of renewed debate. One upshot was a series of manifestos for scholarly neutrality, and a proceduralist emphasis on History as Methodology alone. As the German model of national History was weakened in the first half of the twentieth century, more space was created for competing methodologies within Germany too. The final section of this chapter considers some of those new alternatives.

The later Middle Ages as a cultural period has been shaped by the Burckhardtian tradition: Burckhardt drew a sharp distinction between the ‘medieval’ outlook he believed had prevailed north of the Alps and the ‘rebirth’ of classical antiquity he saw taking place in the Italian peninsula. Over the past 60 years, however, the validity of such a contrast has been called into question. As a consequence, it is now generally accepted that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were characterized more by diversity than by division. This chapter examines how, in every field of cultural endeavour, from painting and sculpture to poetry and music, there emerged a series of quite different, often heterogeneous trends. Originating in different parts of Europe, these were transmitted across the continent, where they interacted with parallel developments elsewhere. The effect was less that of a concerto than of a rich and discordant symphony of competing voices.

The core topic of 2.6 is two modern reader-writers of Donald Frame’s American translation of the Essais (Gore Vidal and David Denby). We consider a range of related intellectual contexts for Frame’s work, a product of the culture of liberal education and of American liberal individualism: modern, pedagogical versions of ‘human philosophy’; the educational goals of elite institutions such as the École Normale Supérieure and Columbia University; the legacy of Pierre Villey’s work in twentieth-century Montaigne studies. We see how twentieth-century humanists in America and Europe called up the real person ‘Montaigne’ from behind his text and made him explain that text’s value to idealist programmes of general literary education. The chapter includes discussions of figures in the German idealist tradition such as Auerbach,and Burckhardt, as well as the critic of Renaissance ‘self-fashioning’, Stephen Greenblatt, and the British critic Terence Cave.