The Owl of Minerva

 

One more word about teaching what the world ought to be: Philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after actuality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. The lesson of the concept, which necessarily is also taught by history, is that only in the ripeness of actuality does the ideal appear over against the real, and that only then does this ideal comprehend this same real world in its substance and build it up for itself into the configuration of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a configuration of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this gray in gray, but only understood; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall. [Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.]   

G.W.F. Hegel, Preface to the Philosophie des Rechts

 

In the course of this essay I shall attempt to comment on the meaning in this famous passage, at least to the uncertain extent that I understand it myself.  I hope that its main point—a personal application of a frequently quoted epigram made by a philosopher of history--will be reasonably clear.  The subject might be defined as the sadness of the search for wisdom.  But it requires the somewhat breathless introduction of three important thinkers.  They are (in an order both chronological and alphabetical) Augustine of Hippo, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, and Clive James.  The three men were very different one from another; yet they shared the crucial commonality of intellectual brilliance deployed upon challenging and consequential subject matter, and extraordinary powers of verbal expression in deploying their ideas.  Augustine (354-430) was a North African Roman who became the most influential theologian in Western Catholicism.  Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher of huge intellectual ambition and influence; and Clive James (1939-2019) was an Australian born journalist and cultural critic who spent most of his life in the intellectual and professional milieux of London.

 

G. W. F. Hegel

 

            Hegel and Clive James are linked for me because of James’s brief but brilliant biography and assessment of him in one of his wonderful essays in Cultural Amnesia.*  If you don’t know this book, I strongly recommend it to any reader with an interest in our cultural history and an appreciation of fine English prose.  It is a collection of a hundred or so brief biographical essays.  Speaking of the famous remark about the Owl of Minerva, James says: “Hegel’s prose could be very beautiful like this.”  Yes, but he immediately adds: “After his death his prose became famous for being unyieldingly opaque, and indeed much of his later prose was.”  I am no expert on Hegel and have found trying to understand him too hard a slog to claim confident success.  Clive James’s six-page essay devoted to him in Cultural Amnesia is one of the clearest, most succinct treatments of a truly towering philosopher I could imagine.

 

Clive James

 

A second famous passage comes from Augustine’s autobiography, the Confessions, and provides a kind of parallel.  It is an address directly from the author to God: “Late [or, probably better, too late] have I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so modern”.  (Sero te amavi pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova.)  Hegel and Augustine share the idea of “too lateness,” but in rather different senses.  Augustine berates himself for time wasted in futile or errant philosophical searches.  Hegel seems to be announcing a morose law of intellectual history.

It will probably be apparent why the themes raised here might impose themselves upon the reflections of a scholar in his old age.  I have devoted a great deal of my life to studying and writing about “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”  I am not sure that the owl has ever appeared in my barn loft, but the raven is sure to before very long.  It’s only a question of time.

In the ancient moral vocabulary, writers make a distinction between two Latin words, scientia and sapientia. The former, scientia, is usually translated as “knowledge”, sapientia as “wisdom.”  The two obviously related concepts are not identical.  Wisdom is the moral fruit of the proper use of knowledge.  We all, or at least most of us, believe in some form of this idea.  Another famous formulation we owe to Pascal in the seventeenth century: “The heart has its reason which reason knows nothing of…We know the truth not only by reason, but by the heart.”

It is at least a curiosity that the symbolic association of the owl (bubo) with wisdom has continued in popular iconography until our own day.  Minerva is the goddess of wisdom.  Her Greek equivalent is Athena.  Her avian emblem, the owl, which once brought the dignity to Athenian coinage that the eagle now sheds upon the American, has largely been co-opted by Walt Disney and seems to represent a kind of endearing avuncular amiability.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but Athena’s bird was more venerable, solemn, indeed magisterial.  Wisdom--a thing different from intelligence or even intellectual brilliance, and certainly different from amassing a boxcar load of quaint and curious facts—seems to be a reward for an attitude rather than the achievable goal of a program of long and scrupulous search.

            It is only natural that a scholar, given the opportunity to look back in review, might want to reflect on the distinction between knowledge and wisdom.  Learning offers its great contributions to one’s life, but it is not a substitute for living. The great French historian Jules Michelet—and I do mean great—is reported to have made the following sad remark late in his life: “I have passed along the side of things, for I mistook history for life.”  Among the four or five most fecund legends in our literary culture is that of Dr. Faustus, usually called the “Faust Legend”.  Remotely based in the memory of an actual Renaissance savant, it records the fictional history of a scholar of great learning who makes a pact with the Devil.  In exchange for a period in which he will enjoy great wealth, prestige, and sexual pleasure, the scholar will give up his immortal soul.  Selling one’s soul has become proverbial. The legend appears in practically all forms of early popular literature—folklore, ballads, broadsheets.  In English literature it is enshrined in Christopher Marlowe’s powerful drama; but its most famous appearance in the literature of “high culture” is in Goethe’s lengthy poetic drama, Faust, which appeared in two parts in the early nineteenth century.  This work is often regarded as the greatest achievement in German, and indeed one of the greatest in world literature. In Goethe’s treatment of the Faust legend, the appetite for universal erudition is paralleled by gross carnal cupidity and criminal indulgence. 

 

Dr. Faustus with mentor
 

Everyone must have some definite concept of the “mad scientist,” a man whose scientific investigations have driven him to the brink, and sometimes over the brink, of lunacy.  Who is likely ever to forget Dr. Strangelove as presented by Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers?  But there are mad humanists galore as well. I speak as one who spent half a century teaching in liberal arts departments of a major institution, and as I scan our contemporary cultural landscape, I find some of our madder humanists only slightly less alarming than Dr. Strangelove, our updated Dr. Frankenstein.  It is the link between erudition and madness that makes what I shall call the “real world” so chary of it.  The “Acts of the Apostles” (cap. 26) gives an account of Paul’s verbal self-defense before Festus, the Procurator of Judaea.  “And as he thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud voice, ‘Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad’.” Has the scientific quest that led to a hydrogen bomb or the technological deployment that led to the overheating of the earth’s entire atmosphere exceeded the bounds of moral capacity?  And the questions that seem so tremendous on the cosmic scale do have their echoes in the twilight lives of aging scholars. The concerns that crowd the mind are hardly of a Faustian grandeur.  They are small, personal, quaint, perhaps even droll, but no less disquieting as we strain our failing ears listening in doubtful hope for the sound of the whoosh of a huge owl’s flapping wings.  Too late?

 

*Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (W. W. Norton: New York and London, 2007), pp. 876.

 

 

Minerva and the Dog

One day during the Easter holiday I watched my youngest granddaughter as, seated on the carpet, she finished the assembly of a kiddy jigsaw puzzle—that is, one with relatively few and distinctly large pieces.  She finished the job pretty quickly, but she had wrongly placed one piece early on, meaning that when she got to the final piece, it didn’t fit the last hole left.  Despite the fact that the earlier misplaced piece stuck out in a sore-thumby fashion, she did her best to jam the last remaining piece into a space not meant to receive it.  This she more or less successfully did at the negligible cost of a couple of semicircles of distressed cardboard.  She looked upon her work and saw that it was good.  Everything seemed to fit.  She had made it fit.  God created the human mind to make sense of things, even if that sense is spurious and contrived.  The results are sometimes amusing.  A good deal of the scholarly life is confidently pounding square pegs into round holes.

My stimulating weekend with experts on the music of the Hispanic Renaissance—previewed in my last post--set me to thinking about all this by way of a kind of textual chain reaction.  One of the most famous works of early Spanish literature is the Celestina, named for one of its central characters.  The Celestina, which styles itself as a tragi-comedy, is a dramatic cautionary tale of the consequences of unbridled sexual passion.  It was written by one Fernando de Rojas at the end of the fifteenth century and enjoyed huge popularity at home and abroad.  I first encountered it in graduate school in the English version of a learned translator of the seventeenth century named James Mabbe—or “Don Diego Puede-Ser” as he styled himself with a joke you’ll get (perhaps) if you know even a little Spanish.  Mr. Maybe’s publisher called the book The Spanish Bawd, as the woman named Celestina is a particularly memorable example of the stock character of the cackling old sexual procurer, go-between, or “madam” made famous by Ovid’s Dipsas and prominent in the Romance of the Rose.

There is some raunchy misogyny in Celestina/Spanish Bawd.  The anti-hero Calisto has fallen madly in love with innocent young Melibea—and I do mean madly.  As a dissuasive, his servant Sempronio hauls out a particularly pungent version of the “all women are sluts” argument, of which the following is one of the gentler parts.  Many ostensibly virtuous women, Mabbe says Sempronio says, “have basely prostituted themselves to the embracement of muleteers and stable grooms, suffering them to breath in their faces, with their unsavory breaths and to embosom them between their breasts.  And other some not ashamed to have companied with brute beasts.  Have you not heard of Pasiphae, who played the wanton with a bull?  And of Minerva, how she dallied with a dog?”

Well, I had certainly heard of Pasiphae.  She is hardly obscure in Greco-Roman mythology, and is memorably treated by Ovid.  With the help of the famous artificer Daedalus, she found an imaginative way to mate with a Cretan bull, and the consequence was—the Minotaur!   But Minerva and a dog?  That seemed a little off, but it did say so right there in black and white.  Like my granddaughter I wanted all the pieces to fit, even if it involved bestiality on the part of the goddess of Wisdom, so I thought no more about it.  I packed it away in the cold storage section of my memory. 

One of the musical lectures I just heard referred to an early passage in the Celestina in which Calisto compares his disordered state of libido to that of an out of tune lute.  Afterward, in tracking down the passage in a Spanish text, it all came back.   I came upon the canine conundrum, which defrosted instantaneously.  There it was again: ¿No has leydo de Pasife con el toro, de Minerva con el can [dog] ?  “Haven’t you read of Pasiphae with the bull, of Minerva with the dog?”  Only this time it was in the footnotes of a learned scholarly edition in the original Spanish in which the editor pointed out that the text was absurd and had to be wrong, a printer’s blunder.  What Rojas must have alluded to was Minerva’s encounter not with a dog (un can) but with Vulcan, the ugly blacksmith god and cuckolded husband of Venus.  The Spanish compositor must have misread uulcan as elcan or uncan because he didn’t know any better.  James Mabbe didn’t know any better either nor, as it turned out, did John Fleming.  Minerva’s unwilling commerce with Vulcan, which obliquely eventuated in the birth of Erichthonius, inventor of the quadriga chariot, is a most obscure mythological event, but it is alluded to by Servius, the learned commentator on Virgil, and the Spanish humanist Fernando de Rojas knew about it.  He also knew that in legend Vulcan was so physically unattractive as perhaps to be commonly regarded as brutish.

I can date my reading of Mabbe’s Spanish Bawd pretty precisely.  It had to be in 1962.  That would mean that for fifty-six years I was lumbering around with the very old and very fake news of Minerva and the dog.  Thankfully it was in the deep freeze drawer of the synapses.  I can’t say I meditated on it much over the years.   But it does make me wonder just how many other mangled jigsaw pieces are resting there beside it.