Arbogast Schmitt, Marburg

Outline

for a

DFG Focus-Program:

The comparison and opposition of ‘Antiquity’ and ‘Modernity’ in the Modern Age.

Requirements and Consequences of the Break with Medieval Tradition

 

 

Outline of the Problem and stage of research:

The early modern ages has, in a series of writings on the topic as well as in a great number of relevant statements, advocated the belief that it is a period immediately congenial to antiquity. The ‘comparisons’ and ‘parallels’ not only refer to the two epochs in general, they are common practice in all societal-culturally relevant spheres and proven by intensive individual studies: in ethics, politics and state-theory, economics, in the theory and practice of the arts. And, as can only be recognized clearly in the newer research, the ‘humanistic’ scholarly recourse to antiquity does not just exist in the ‘fine arts and sciences’, but also in the natural sciences, in physics, medicine, botanics, zoology, etc. As they see it themselves, this back-reference is the result of a break and a departure: the liberation from the paternalism of religion and authorities, the overcoming of scholastically deducing dogmatism and a turning to methodical observation of the empirically individual.

This self-conception that resulted from the knowledge of the break with medieval tradition and which is made up of the awareness of an absolute new beginning, a radical paradigm shift, the incomparable otherness and a fundamental superiority, did not only take very broad effect, it had and has also a tremendous history of affect. The same arguments that had already been propounded in the 14 and 15 centuries by Petrarca, Bruni, Patrizi, Nizzolini and many others are not just repeated at the height of the ‘Dispute between the Friends of Antiquity and Modernity’ in France during the late 17th Century, even current research — despite a great number of individual investigations, which at least limit this picture — is still dependent on this self-conception in many aspects, particularly in regard to the understanding of the general meaning of the epoch-break.

The restrictions of this ‘modern age’ self-conception, which has long been traditionalized, on the one hand stem from an understanding of medieval times that has been corrected in many respects and which includes the recognition that the Middle Ages were themselves a time of comprehensive and intensive antiquity reception. Even most of the ‘rediscovered’ texts of antiquity were known. The ‘rediscovery’ was frequently nothing more than a new translation or meant a second-rate accession (as for example in Sextus Empiricus).

On the other hand, the restrictions are due to a closer observing of the particular form of antiquity reception in and since the renaissance. The renaissance to an overwhelming degree prefers the Hellenistic roman antiquity with its sensualistic empiricist philosophies of the Stoa, Epicureanism and skepticism. These philosophies, with the cultural environment they coined around the time between about 300BC and 200AD, with authors such as Lucretius, Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Quintilian, Vitruv, Pseudo-Longinus, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertios, form the main field of reception and simultaneously supply the perspective from which non-Hellenistic antiquity is also interpreted. Aristotelian poetics for example is naturally read as a commentary on Horace’ ‘ars poetica’ after its ‘rediscovery’, interest in Plato lies mainly in his price on the ‘sensual sheen of beauty’, the tragedy reception is geared to Seneca in theory and practice, the history of philosophy is largely classified according to the Hellenistic model as a dogmatic, skeptical/critical, (‘zetetic’) philosophy and literature-examination and science-assessment are geared to this kind of dichotic thinking, etc.

 

Research Desiderata and the Conceptual Formulation of the Focal Point:

 

The ways and filiations of this reception-change during the early modern ages have been laid out for individual important areas, particularly more recent research has also recognized and described in more detail the importance of turning to this sub-area of antiquity; in view of the all-encompassing influence that this reception-change had on a broad specter of the arts and sciences of the modern ages, however, there is still a very large demand for further research.

As the middle Ages, too, were coined by an intensive antiquity-reception, although by an antiquity with primarily Platonic, Aristotelian and neo-Platonic influences, the history of their effect (Wirkungsgeschichte) conveyed by the Syrians, Arabs, Jews, one of the fundamental questions that has to be answered first is how this change in reception regarding antiquity came about. Then one has to ask above all what consequences the reception-change has for the development of an awareness of this break in tradition and the ‘new-ness’, and in fact for the different areas of cognitive theory, ethics, politics, economics, theories of literature and art, in the new ‘empirical’ sciences, etc. What does it mean, when Sextus Empiricus and no longer Aristotle supplies the criteria for the self-reflexion of thought, when ethics is divided up into the contrast of a stoic feeling of duty and an Epicurean feeling of desire and no longer orientates itself on the simultaneously best and most enjoyable human activity as in Aristotle and still in Thomas, when Hobbes draws on stoic and Epicurean teachings instead of scholastic Aristotle, when physics and biology are drawn into the dualism of a causal-mechanical explanation of nature of Democritean-Epicurean provenience and a teleological theology of nature of stoic origin, when no longer Boethius, but rather Vitruv becomes an authority in architecture, etc.? Why is this process connected to a massive valorization of the trivial sciences at the universities, while the quadrivial ones are pushed back or are assigned a serving role to the new empirical sciences? Why does the analysis of the conceptual

preconditions of number and size (in the quadrivium) change into a combinatorial universal science?, etc.

 

A hermeneutic aid could be found when considering the fact that there already was a (nearly) universal break with Platonic-Aristotelian thought at the end of the fourth century, where the then newly developing Hellenistic philosophies reverted back to forms of pre-Socratic philosophizing. This change is also a turnaround from theory to practice, from a reflexive rationality to methodically conducted empiricism, here one also finds the valorization of imagination (Phantasia, Imaginatio) to the central mental organ, here one also finds (in the Stoa) a theologization of the material world, and here, too, one finds the problem of delimitation to claims of pseudo-Platonism or pseudo-Aristotelianism (e.g. in Poseidonios, Antiochos of Askalon and partly also in Seneca), which have an effect up into present research and have led to frequently illegitimate identifications of Stoic with Platonic-neo-Platonic positions.

As the early modern ages recollect exactly these Hellenistic philosophies, their understanding of the world and the arts, as opposed to a mainly neo-Platonically commentated Aristotle, they undergo, under changed conditions of the subject, an analogous change. Taking note of this analogy has a not insubstantial heuristic value for the question of whether the new of the modern ages is sufficiently explained when described as liberation from authoritative constraints and dogmatic naivety. It seems that the modern ages did not simply discover the spontaneous self-agency of thought, but rather newly constructed it from a new, primarily sensualistic basis, interested in practice. The conditions of this construction do not stand in opposition to a naïve clearness, but to a highly reflected school philosophy, and are themselves a result of a new scholarly belief in authority (just of a different antiquity) and not spontaneous processes of liberation.

 

Whichever way this relation has to be interpreted and evaluated in detail, it can hardly be adequately characterized in the self-conception that the modern ages developed themselves, if it is (also following up from the ancient skeptical history of philosophy writing) portrayed primarily as ratio of a clearly naïve, dogmatic to a reflexive, sentimentally critical way of thinking. The awareness of the contrast between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, borne directly from the rivalry of the modern ages comparing themselves directly with ‘the’ antiquity, is however to a considerable extent based upon the contrast of a ‘naturalistic’ compared to a reflexive way of thinking and in this form dominates the interpretation of the development of Europe’s intellectual history up to the present. The variable forms of this antithetic awareness, which detaches itself very quickly from its ties to ‘antiquity’ and ‘modernity’ and becomes the criteria-supplier for the evaluation of historical development in the most varied individual areas, have not been investigated enough at all. They frequently pass for quasi compellingly cultivating forms of historical development, their constructiveness is either not recognized or not brought into focus clearly enough.

 

Possible Projects and Project Areas

 

 

The outlined problem yields particularly the following larger fields for research:

1. How is the rediscovery of the Hellenistic philosophies in the Middle Ages (primarily in Scotism, Ockhamism, in forms of Aristotle-criticism, etc.) prepared?

2. Under which conditions and in which forms are Stoa, Epicureanism and skepticism received in the arts and sciences? What is their relation (especially in this point does the research to date need to be supplemented) to their theoretic pre-forms (and are not simply ‘rebirths’ of the turning to the sensory world)

3. How does the reception-change also influence the reception and interpretation of Plato and Aristotle?

4. How does this reception-change breed the awareness of living in a time congenial to ‘true’ antiquity and finally the awareness of a quarrel of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ concepts?

5. What are the consequences of this contrast-awareness for

6) To what degree does the modern and postmodern overcoming the topos of ‘dichotomist’ thinking refer to and is dependent on this antithesis antiquity-modernity?

 

The mentioned areas do by no means cover all the important areas, they would have to be added from the respective personal research competence of the project participants. On the other hand it is clear that even an effective and competent research group could still not remotely manage to complete the necessary research tasks resulting from the outlined change situation. Nevertheless it is important to make a consistent start that orientates itself on the problems that the reception-change in the early modern ages brought with it, without unhistorically taking the then ‘modern’ contrast-awareness itself as the basis for one’s own research.

 

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