Philosophy or Philology: Auerbach and Aesthetic HistoricismAuthor(s): Charles BreslinReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1961), pp. 369-381Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708131 .Accessed: 30/04/2012 19:47

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PHILOSOPHY OR PHILOLOGY: AUERBACH AND AESTHETIC HISTORICISM

BY CHARLES BRESLIN

The cultural phenomenon known as historicism * has made a somewhat belated appearance in American intellectual life. This con- cept is still an innovation for us and that accounts, perhaps, for its very imperfect assimilation into our pragmatic thought patterns. Fanatic espousal and total excoriation both betray a shallow under- standing of historicism, which in reality is not a single idea but an historical complex of ideas. The field of literary studies reflects the inadequacy of our assimilation to quite a pronounced degree. "After the year 1858 came the year 1859, that is historicism." Such are the words of an eminent American critic and man of letters. Most of our avowed historicists and, conversely, their critics, are far more con- cerned with what they believe to be the essential philosophical im- plications of historicism, viz. relativism, scepticism, moral and aes- thetic indifferentism, etc., than with historicism as a hermeneutic principle and general intellectual orientation through which a literary work of art, in all its richness and plenitude, can be made to reveal itself meaningfully to the human spirit.

This is not to say that the logical nature of the category of his- toricism is free from conceptual confusion. In a recent study the Crocean Carlo Antoni has viewed historicism as a multifaceted con- cept formed by the liberal historicism of XVIIIth-century Europe, Vico's humanistic historicism, the romantic historicism of Herder, Savigny, and Jakob Grimm, the dialectical historicism of Hegel, Marx's materialistic historicism, and the absolute historicism of Benedetto Croce.' Those with a philosophical turn of mind might legitimately inquire whether historicism denotes a determinate mode of thought, a heuristic or scientific method, an historical theory of knowledge, an interpretation of history, or a completed Weltan- schauung or philosophy. What role, for instance, would the concept play in the construction of a formal logic of history or of a material philosophy of history? These epistemological complexities need not be elucidated here; they are mentioned only to give some intimation of the kind of problems that surround the idea of historicism. It cer- tainly confronts us with issues that are among the deepest, the most basic, and the most mysterious of those which perpetually engage the powers of the human understanding. As a help toward perspective,

* The term Historismus is of German origin; the French l'historisme, the Italian lo storicismo, and the English historicism are adaptations of that word.

I Carlo Antoni, Lo Storicismo (Roma, 1957). 369

370 CHARLES BRESLIN

however, we can do no better than to consider the words of Fried- rich Meinecke and Ernst Troeltsch, two of the most sensitive and learned investigators of this movement. For Meinecke "the essence of historicism consists in the substitution of an individualizing view toward historical-human forces for a generalizing one, . . . one of the greatest revolutions that human thought has undergone." 2 For Troeltsch the phenomenon signified "the radical historicizing of our entire knowledge and perception of the spiritual world"; he regarded historicism and naturalism as the "two great scientific creations of the modern world" 3

In order to define the relation of literary study to historicism we must first of all turn to the work of Erich Auerbach, a scholar who has brilliantly realized the full depth and range of potentialities en- compassed by aesthetic historicism. His understanding of this con- cept is stated with clarity and eloquence in a passage from his well- known book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature:

When people realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such premises not only the natural factors like climate and soil but also the intel- lectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in their origins and in the direction taken in their development. Now we know that the insights which I have just enumerated and which taken all together represent the intellectual trend known as Historismus were fully developed during the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany.4

The above is obviously a most comprehensive statement of the his- toristic view of life and one that also illuminates its convergence with

2 F. Meinecke, Die Enstehung des Historismus (Munich, 1959), 2, 1. 3 F. Wagner, Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich, 1951), 360. K. Heussi, Die Krisis

des Historismus (Tiubingen, 1932), 13. 4 E. Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, 1953), 443-4.

AUERBACH 'S AESTHETIC HISTORICISM 371

the tradition of Geistesgeschichte. This way of looking at things has ever been latent in the secularization and intense historical dynamism of the West; it has progressively disclosed new dimensions in the his- torical being of the human race. Auerbach's conception is akin to the aesthetic historicism which pertains to the inner freedom and indi- vidual creativity of the historian. This type of historicism is exempli- fied in the writings of Carlyle, Michelet, and Burckhardt; it arose in the XIXth century as a reaction against the monistic strictures of naturalistic and metaphysical historicism, the one seeking to subsume historical phenomena within the categories of exact or positive sci- ence, the other seeking to formulate a metaphysical principle that would unify the realms of nature and history. Its rise was also a con- sequence of the prodigous accumulation and pillaging of cultural- historical materials, a process which alienated the study of human history from its vital context and obscured all possibility of genuinely fruitful creativity. The doctrine of L'histoire pour 1'histoire provoked Nietzsche's famous Zweite Unzeitgemdsse, which deplored the sub- mergence of human life beneath a monstrous antiquarianism. Another aspect of this condition was the historian's proclivity to lapse into a kind of aesthetic, sceptical, or ironic contemplation in the face of a multitude of individualities, endless transformations, and vast inter- play of forces. The fact that resignation, pessimism, and enervating relativism could result from this aesthetic historicism was a contin- gency Auerbach himself recognized when he spoke of general and aesthetic historicism as "a precious (and also very dangerous) acquisi- tion of the human mind." ' His own conception is derived from the breadth and diversity of the contemporary aesthetic horizon and is grounded in the belief that historical relativism or perspectivism has a twofold aspect: "it concerns the understanding historian as well as the phenomenon he understood." 6 The historical antecedents for these views are, of course, to be found in the XIXth and in the latter part of the XVIIIth century. Aesthetic historicism for Auerbach was a product of German romanticism, and it rests on the conviction that "every civilization and every period has its own possibilities of aes- thetic perfection; that the works of art of different peoples and periods, as well as their general forms of life, must be understood as products of variable individual conditions, and have to be judged each by its own development, not by absolute rules of beauty and ugliness."

The real import and validity of Auerbach's historistic approach to literature will become apparent if we recall that he was imbued

5 Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York, 1959), 184. 6 Studia Philologica et Litteraria in Honorem L. Spitzer (Bern, 1958), 35. 7Scenes, 183-4.

372 CHARLES BRESLIN

with all that was most fertile in the XIXth-century German tradi- tion of philology, a tradition for which we have no exact counterpart in this country. Indeed, for many of us the word philology itself, a term which has a very wide signification in German, tends to evoke thoughts suggesting the most concentrated and arid sort of pedantry. Yet Theophil Spoerri, a critic reminiscent of Rene Wellek in his pre- occupation with literature and value theory, has described the philolo- gist as one who is concerned with "the reflections of life, with shining appearances, which are the products of a creative process, of a trans- formation, and a transfiguration." 8 If we are to believe the mature Philolog (Auerbach, E. R. Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Karl Vossler, Helmut Hatzfeld, are probably the best known in America), the discipline of philology must be regarded as an indispensable prolegomenon to gen- uine literary criticism; in fact, it is the source and foundation of any sound literary judgment which has as its object a work of art whose medium is language. Philology is more than an auxiliary, or instru- mental science; actually it forms an integral and necessary part of what we call literary criticism.

For Auerbach the highly developed critical faculty consists of a special sense for significant facts and for a synoptic comprehension of the "breadth of the general culture, which rests on the passionate inclination to absorb everything that could be useful for the interest under pursuit." O The literary critic must ultimately possess an imag- ination of considerable innate vitality and revelatory power if he ever hopes to penetrate language, which itself is not only the sub- stance of the literary art work but also the most fundamental of symbolic forms. Through the manifold expressions of linguistic ac- tivity the historical dimension of human existence makes itself known to men, in the words of Giambattista Vico, a thinker highly esteemed by Auerbach, il mondo delle nazione. The critical acumen requisite for their comprehension is not transmissible pedagogically, it cannot be reduced to questions of method, but is rather the function and telos of all method. Methodology, however extensive or finely wrought, will remain sterile if it fails to culminate in the critical qual- ities that Auerbach mentions. One might think that literary criticism as it is currently practised often exhibits these very qualities and in most cases without benefit of that laborious background in grammar, lexicography, source and textual criticism, bibliography, techniques of collecting, etc., which Auerbach considers so essential. But he also states that if the critical virtues cannot be taught they can and must

8T. Spoerri, Der Weg zur Form (Hamburg, 1954), 156. 9 Vier Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Franz6sischen Bildung (Bern, 1951),

9.

AUERBACH S AESTHETIC HISTORICISM 373

be formed and sharpened. It is philology that will enable us to re- evoke, to re-know the past structures of the human spirit and to repossess them internally whether this be done through a literary or any other kind of linguistic document. This process is not equivalent to an identification of literature with history, using literature as a kind of external 'source' for historical knowledge. But literature is the embodiment of an image or vision of human life, and this image is inevitably reflected only through the prism of its own historical matrix. What we try to define as the aesthetic qualities of a literary work are indissolubly welded to its particular vision of reality, its representation of human life. The task of philology, as Wilamowitz- Moellendorf once expressed it, is "through the power of knowledge to make that transpired life live again, the song of the poet, the thoughts of the philosopher and the lawgiver, the sanctity of the chapel, and the feelings of the faithful and the sceptical, the varie- gated activity in market and harbor, land and sea, and men in their work and play." 10 The objective of philology is the resuscitation of man's successive and multiform visions of himself and his world in all dimensions of their being. Without this discipline the primal or onto- logical identity of a literary work of art can easily become dissolved into psychologism; its essence will remain encrusted with those am- bivalent 'concretions,' to use Roman Ingarden's term, which mirror the viscissitudes of its historical fortunes.

In one of his works Auerbach defines philology as "the aggregate of activities which occupy themselves methodically with the language of man and the works of art composed within this language." 11 For him the term retains the comprehensive meaning it received from one of its most distinguished modern founders August Boeckh; philology is "Erkenntnis des Erkannten," knowledge of what is known. Of its various different forms at least one, the critical edition of texts, is quite ancient; others such as linguistics, bibliography and biography, critical aesthetics, literary history, and explication des textes are of comparatively recent origin. As a translator and student of Vico's "New Science" Auerbach, in formulating his own idea of 'style' and philology, has substantially adopted Vico's filologia, which desig- nates the whole residual corpus of the historical process in all its staggering complexity. If we refer to the stylistic concepts of modern literary science this fiologia will appear virtually synonymous with Geistesgeschichte. The contemporary literary scholar can be said to represent the human spirit at a given stage of its self-realization and this can be asserted without the intrusion of any Hegelian pettifog-

10 Geschichte der Philologie (Leipzig, 1959), 1. "Introduction aux etudes de Philologie Romane (Frankfurt, 1949), 9.

374 CHARLES BRESLIN

gery. In addressing himself to literary documents of the past the scholar is in reality confronted with an order of symbolic expressions which are literally transpired forms of life. His understanding of them will be based on an intimate, intuitive, and systematic knowledge of those peculiar forms of life and expression embedded in and sig- nificative of the cultural matrix from which a literary work springs and of which it is a spiritual articulation.

According to Auerbach, then, it is philology that engenders and cultivates a "state of mind capable of revealing in itself all varieties of human experience, of rediscovering them in its own 'modifica- tions.' 11 12 Our modern world picture is a realization of certain po- tentialities inherent within the total structure of human existence, but the present is nevertheless only one particular stage in the col- lective consciousness of humanity. Auerbach speaks of our being here and now historically "with all the richness and limitedness that this contains." 13 The sheer preponderance and singularity, the pervasive immediacy and ubiquity of the modern world-view act as a hindrance in the effort to re-experience the life of a literature which is itself the emanation of a remote or alien mental formation or cultural complex. Following Vico, Auerbach sees philology as both the inchoate science of spirit in the great breadth of its positive moments and as the hermeneutic or method for the intrinsic rediscovery of these moments through the medium of their documents, that is, through their his- torical 'words,' their umana Voci.

Auerbach's interest in the method of explication de texte will be- come clear if it is seen within this philological context. Explication compels the literary scholar to read "with a fresh, spontaneous, and sustained attention" 14 and abstain scrupulously from premature judgments. In other words it will assist him to attain "the greatest possible freedom from world-view or other dogmatic preconcep- tions." 15 In the age of Malraux's imaginary museum when works of art have become isolated from their cultural function and from the center of their epoch it is no doubt correct to refer to these works -cf. T. S. Eliot and Rene Wellek-as monuments rather than docu- ments. Yet works of literature are not inert monuments in the same sense as are works of plastic art or of architecture or even of music. The verbal medium, unlike the stones or the colors of the architect and painter, is essentially living, dynamic, progressing, and is con- stantly transforming itself. Also the thoroughly rationalistic and positivistic trends of the XXth century must first apprehend the art

12 Studia, 34-35. 13Literatursprache und publikum in der spdtantike und im Lateinisches

Mittelalter (Bern, 1958), 22. 14 Introduction, 36. 15 Vier Untersuchungen, 10.

AUERBACH S AESTHETIC HISTORICISM 375

of a Pindar or Dante or Cervantes as a literary document and then, through manifold explication, attempt to relive the vital experience it contains and symbolizes, to perceive its singular nature. Such a process, which takes place within the modifications of the reader's own mind and within the depths of his own consciousness, is ante- cedent to the development and application of formal aesthetic cate- gories. A work of literature does not have to be 'reconstructed' as do the events of an historical narrative, but its complete physical avail- ability to us does not obviate the necessity of explication, which is subtle and difficult enough. Without such a heuristic the literary document can quite easily become subject to what Herbert Read has aptly called the fallacy of retrospective interpretation. Through the pervasiveness and ossification of established modes of thought, a work's real character and its importance as Anthropologie, as com- mentary on the essential nature of man, could be forever lost to us. In Auerbach's words "it is a difficult and infinite task to understand the particular character of historical forms and their interrelations, a task requiring, apart from learning and intelligence, a passionate devotion, much patience, and something which may well be called magnanim- ity." 16 This magnanimity is connected ideologically with the Verstehen of Dilthey and Schleiermacher, with Winckelmann's in- terpretation of art works, and Herder's empathy. C. S. Lewis in our own time voices similar thoughts when he states that in order to enjoy our full potentialities we ought, so far as possible, "to contain within us, and on occasion to actualize all the modes of thinking and feeling through which man has passed." 17

The analyses in Mimesis show that explication de texte-whether its vantage point originates from a special semantic, syntactic, aesthetic, or sociological problem-can effectively illuminate the aesthetic value of a text, the psychology of its author, or even the spirit of a literary epoch. Nor does the method disengage a work of literature from its living milieu; both pedagogically and scientifically this is a most sane and fertile approach to literature. Among the many currents of modern thought which have contributed to its scientific development is Croce's conception of the identity of linguistics and aesthetics wherein the latter is seen as the science of expression and general linguistic. Of equal importance is the phenom- enology of Edmund Husserl which strives, in its search for Wesens- schau, to intuit and elucidate the essence of phenomena. The impor- tance of this philosophy for literary theory has been amply demonstrated through the intensive studies of Roman Ingarden. Heinrich Woelfflin's theory of art history has also been a notable con-

16 Studia, 34. 17 C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York, 1956), 63.

376 CHARLES BRESLIN

tribution. The method of explication has received considerable en- richment from philologists like Leo Spitzer who seeks the 'inner life-center' of a literary work and Karl Vossler for whom aesthetic criticism can be the quintessence of philology. A radical historicism is, of course, an undeniable presupposition of the explication procedure.

Helmut Hatzfeld, who is well aware of the necessity for historical analysis in literary study, contends that axiological historicism is not an ineluctable sequitur of the historical approach. He admits that only historical erudition can preserve the literary analyst from amateurism, but the reader must at the same time reserve the 'existential liberty' of embracing or rejecting the views expressed in a text and its form, a judgment which will be based on aesthetic, moral, or metaphysical values. For him the real significance of a literary work is not explicable purely in terms of a technical or aesthetic formalism; it must also comprehend those moral and metaphysical elements whose presence and elaboration lend a work its essentially human reference. In his Initiation d 1'explication de textes franvais (Munich, 1957), Hatzfeld discusses a number of steps involved in the course of explicating a text, and it is not fortuitous that criticism comes last in time; the point is that literary criticism must await historical analysis if it is not to stultify itself. Hatzfeld's value qualities are similar to Rudolf Unger's Probleme, those inescapable "existential" concomitants of the human condition, such as love, death, and the sense of nature and community. Historicism, of course, does not deny the existence or validity of such values or universal human problems; it does, however, aver that their material correlates and functional meaning, the whole resonance of their sensu- ous embodiment in language constantly shifts throughout history with the changing perspectives of thought and feeling.

Certain aspects of Roman Ingarden's thought strongly support the heuristic claims of aesthetic historicism. In Das Literarische Kunstwerk: Eine Untersuchung aus dem Grenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft (Halle, 1931) the Polish philosopher has analyzed the fundamental structure and mode of being of the literary art work. This formidable undertaking is accomplished through utilizing the phenomenology of Husserl and the insights of Russian formalism. Ingarden contends that the correct formulation of aesthetic problems is dependent on the posited results of Wesensanatomie. A key axiom of phenomenological analysis requires that the investigator divest his own consciousness and hence the phenomenon itself from all the accretions which custom, prejudice, assumption, and tradition have formed around them. When applied to the study of literature the method endeavors to define the literary art work as a polyphonic harmony of unique aesthetic value-qualities.

AUERBACH 'S AESTHETIC HISTORICISM 377

The historical fate or 'life' of a literary work is the sum of its concre- tions (Konkretizationen), of that plethora of interpretations it ac- quires in its long and infinitely varied association with individual psyches and with the changing cultural climates of history. These concretions are both interesting and important; indeed, some of them provide the very material for histories of literary criticism, but Ingarden's primary concern is with the literary art work itself. The point being that some of these concretions are consonant and con- formable with the Parahaltung, with those potentialities of meaning and affect contained within the work itself. But many other material- izations, readings, exegeses, or interpretations, whether due to the subjective fancy of an individual or to the pressure of a cultural climate, will yield distortions, falsifications, or aberrations of the original work. Certainly the thorniest problems of literary theory are those that turn on the determination of valid and significant con- cretions. Which of them precipitate an extraneous modification in the collective polyphony of a work and thereby exceed its pre-established limits of variability, and which of them enhance and fulfill the genuine self-contained form of the work? Ingarden sees the literary work of art as containing a special sphere of peculiarly constructed objectivities, as an altogether fixed and unified pattern or structure not reducible to the manifold of subjective concretions. It possesses an 'intersubjective identity,' and although its concretions are in at least one sense its 'life,' psychologism need not be the philosophical consequence of this.

Auerbach considers one of Vico's axioms of particular importance for the understanding of historicism and the modern conception of cultural or period style: "The nature of (human or historical) things is nothing but their coming into being at certain times and in certain fashions. Whenever the time and fashion is thus and so, such and not otherwise are the things that come into being." 18 The burden of this degnita is that man has no other nature than his history, that hu- man nature is a function of history. Ingarden is saying much the same thing when he writes: "It is an acknowledged fact that each epoch in the development of human culture possesses its special types of understanding, of aesthetic and extra-aesthetic values, its determ- inate presuppositions in regard to exactly such and not other ways of comprehension of the world generally, but also of works of art." :" This condition governs artistic creation as well as aesthetic interpre- tation. The vicissitudes of history subject a literary work of art to unpredictable transmutations, retrogressions, renascences. Analogi- cally a work can even 'die' a natural death if it should become

18 G. Vico, New Science, tr. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Cornell, 1948), 58. 19 R. Ingarden, Das Literarische Kunstwerk (Halle, 1931), 361.

378 CHARLES BRESLIN

totally alien or incomprehensible to the readers of a given period. Hence the immediate task of literary criticism is necessarily an his- torical one, involving certain predispositions imparted by the historicist attitude; the scholar must labor to restore the original sig- nificance of the text, to uncover its proper form, to disclose its individual essence. Nicolai Hartmann, speaking in the language of ontology, observed that such a labor will be crowned by experiencing "the resurrection or rebirth of an historically dead spirit" which has been infused with life once again after a prolonged interval of silence.20

Auerbach's early book on Dante contains some thoughts that will illustrate Ingarden's analysis. Dante's work is not so remote from us in time that more than a minimum of historical empathy is required to gain entrance into its poetic world, but neither a powerful sense of such empathy nor the most searching scholarship will be of any avail if the 'will' or mind remain unmoved and is recalcitrant toward Dante's poetry. Auerbach concedes that historical concretions can exhibit new dimensions within the being of the human spirit's great creations without mutilating or destroying their identity or actuality. Yet in the Divine Comedy "there is a limit of its power to transmute itself." He believes this limit was reached when readers of the Com- media tried to dissociate its poetic beauties from the doctrine and the object or substance of the poem and to evaluate them as purely sensuous phenomena. The Commedia cannot be read as "pure poetry" because "the object and doctrine of the poem are not an incidental work, but the roots of its poetic beauty . . . they are the moving forces, the form of this matter, they animate and kindle the high imagina- tion; they first lend to the visionary appearance along with its true form the power to seize and enchant." 21 The linguistic character of the Divine Comedy is determined by the fusion of several elements: one involves the hard, realistic, and authentic reporting of actual events, the other didactic or dogmatic promulgation of rational doc- trine concerning the world's order. In the poem itself these two ele- ments are nowhere completely separable and their coalescence is so perfect that the characteristic element of the poetic, the imagination, has forfeited its autonomy. Simply stated, chimerical criticism can be avoided only if we judge a work "in the same spirit that its author wrote," and aesthetic historicism cultivates a temper of mind through which the original spirit of a work or an age can manifest itself, and can become knowable within its own "historical space."

When Heinrich Woelfflin asserted that the formal artistic possi- bilities, the modes of vision, are not the same in every age, he arrived

20 N. Hartmann, Das Problem des Geistigen Seins (Berlin, 1949), 487. 21 E. Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der Irdischen Welt (Berlin, 1929), 196.

AUERBACH S AESTHETIC HISTORICISM 379

at what is surely a very fundamental truth. Some fairly obvious ex- amples can be found in the sphere of literature itself. For instance the distinctive qualities of Rabelais' writing, its syntactic flexibility, narrative spontaneity, opulence of vocabulary, are expressive of ca- pacities largely indigenous to the expansive linguistic condition of his time. His XVIIth-century successors, such as Bossuet or Pascal, how- ever, wrote in and strengthened a language of greater syntactic rigid- ity, one that lent itself to precision, clarity, and symmetry. The re- spective styles of Rabelais and Pascal are, of course, not mutually exclusive. The point is rather that the exploitation and realization of artistic possibilities at any given time is dependent upon and oriented by an intricate concatenation and fusion of cultural factors which we designate collectively as an historical 'moment.' But Woelfflin's thesis has profound consequences even beyond the realm of aesthetics. What might be called the prevailing focus or ethos of an age, its underlying axiological layer of mind, can well determine the intrinsic character or nature of its cultural expressions. The historicist recognizes that no single era or culture will, or indeed can, actualize with equal em- phasis all the various potentialities of knowledge and expression con- tained within man's creative consciousness. But the form or style of a period has a discernible force, direction, and temper which is both limited and distinguishable. One of Auerbach's major preoccupations was with the great interlocking themes of European spiritual develop- ment such as the effect of Christianity on subsequent forms of ex- pression. Yet, as Max Scheler explained, it is difficult for people living in a scientific age to apprehend cultural manifestations that have emanated from an essentially religious or metaphysical substratum. This is so because metaphysics cannot be practiced in laboratories and the techniques of scientific research do little toward enhancing the viability of religion. Marx put the matter a little differently when he asked if Achilles was really conceivable in an era of powder and lead, or the Iliad in these days of the printing-press and press-jack.

The Pre-Socratics, the Upanishads, and much ancient Chinese writing frequently appear obscure or naive to us because our pre- dominantly analytical thought patterns must become modified in order to perceive the semantic coalescence between concrete and ab- stract which underlies their expression. If we want to understand Greek metaphysics we must accustom ourselves to a way of thinking known as conceptual or extreme realism which asserts that the super- sensible exists no less than the sensible. This way of grasping reality is foreign to a contemporary mind steeped in positivism and nominal- ism, and its comprehension necessitates a process of rediscovery. Wil- helm Worringer believed that our historical realism can give us an extensive knowledge of the outward forms of religious and artistic

380 CHARLES BRESLIN

phenomena of the past, but real understanding entails a recreation and interpretation of the basic creative energy and inevitability of expression that pervade them. When Johan Huizinga described the mediaeval city dweller as one to whom all things presented them- selves in violent contrasts and impressive forms, we can but dimly intimate the palpable reality of this "violent tenor of Life." Henry Adams once said of the Chanson de Roland that "not one man in a hundred thousand could now feel what the eleventh century felt" in these verses, because our age has lost much of its "ear for poetry and its eye for color and line." 22 Rosamond Tuve's reading of George Herbert's Sacrifice is marvelously penetrating because when read "by the illumination of the tradition in which it was concerned it takes on a richness, depth, and complexity, and moving power." 23 The possibility of meaningfully assimilating our past is one legacy of historicism that even Ernst Troeltsch was loath to abandon in his search for an UIberwindung of historicism itself.

Historicism in literary study, however, does not envisage an ulti- mately philosophical goal, one whose aim would be the ideal restora- tion of the human spirit's total presence. This Platonic idea, or verum (to use Vico's technical term), partially realizes itself in the vision of life and sense of order present in every historical age. It represents all of man's diverse efforts toward self-understanding which have re- ceived and will receive symbolic expression throughout history. The initial concern of Auerbach as literary scholar is to read literary docu- ments in terms of the historical conditions that they immediately re- flect and express, to read them, that is, in the light of their positive moments or stages. This orientation enables him to cope with what students of language often consider the most difficult problem of meaning, viz. the influence of context or situation. Such extreme historicism eventuates in relativism which, in Auerbach's estimation, is the "prerequisite for all serious and comprehensive historical work." 24 It is Vico, once again, who furnishes him with an antidote against what is pernicious in philosophical relativism. The historically diverse forms of human thought can be rediscovered, or recreated within the structure, the potentialities, the modificazioni of the hu- man mind. Consequently, the literature of former ages is not in any sense radically or irrevocably alien to man's spirit at its present junc- ture, but its re-assimilation by us can be effected only if this litera- ture is addressed and explored in such a way that it reveals itself in both its uniqueness and historical dimension. This is what Auerbach means when he says that "it is from the material itself that he [the

22 Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (New York, 1904), 29. 23R. Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago, 1952), 32. 24E. Auerbach, Vier Untersuchungen, 10.

AUERBACH S AESTHETIC HISTORICISM 381

critic] will learn to extract the categories or concepts which he needs for describing and distinguishing the different phenomena," 25 and that any valid methodological approach or point of departure "must be pregnantly and precisely, not only analogically, applicable to the historical object." 26

Since historicism is an ineradicable component of our modern world-view, its dialectical development has confronted us with an- other momentous task, one which transcends and absorbs the study of particular historical manifestations. The modern investigator must now concern himself with continuity, interrelations, and synthesis. According to Auerbach historicism as a spiritual movement has com- pelled us to proceed from historical individualities to an 'historical Typology,' and finally to the conception of a "synthetic-historical philosophy." The stupendous growth in our knowledge or concrete experience of the forms of historical life and the refinement of our methodological techniques has rendered the need for comparison and synthesis inevitable, but supremely difficult. Geistesgeschichte, the inner goal of Auerbach's investigations, has become a real possibility and we now need to develop what Fritz Saxl once called "the aesthetic historical sensibility." The present object of philology is to seek a whole formed in such a way that "it works as a dialectical unity, like a drama, or as Vico once said, like a serious poem." 27 But the serioso Poema, which is European civilization, is approaching an end; its unity as a spiritual configuration is destined for amalgamation within the greater unity of world history.

At the turn of the XIXth century Friedrich Schlegel prophesied that the study of literature in the modern world would demand a scholar, a free and educated man, who had the power "to attune him- self at will to philosophy or philology, to criticism or poetry, to his- tory or rhetoric, to the ancient or the modern." 28 Surely Erich Auer- bach possessed this very power.

Louisville, Ky.

25Studia, 35. 26Literatursprache, 20. 27Ibid., 10. 28F. Schlegel, Kritische Schriften (Munich, 1956), 12.