Reception History: A New Word for An Old Methodology?*

A few weeks back, while I was reading Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche, I posted here asking readers to list their favorite reception histories. Thanks to you all for helping put together a very comprehensive list. Today, having just read Martin Woessner’s really smart Heidegger in America, I post again about reception history, this time asking more of a meta-question: Are intellectual history and reception history two words for the same thing? Woessner comes close to making this argument, at least insofar as intellectual history is understood to be the history of thought and the history of thinking, not necessarily the social history of intellectuals.

One thing I noticed about both the arguments of Ratner-Rosenhagen and Woessner: The key to understanding the American reception of Nietzsche and Heidegger is understanding America. Such is the logic, at least, of reception history as they seem to understand it. Reception history for them is about how ideas morph when moving from one context to the next, such as from Germany to the United States, or from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Their reception history is also interested in how ideas represent culture; how ideas help people cope with culture; how ideas even sometimes remake culture. Ratner-Rosenhagen “argues that confrontations with Nietzsche laid bare a fundamental concern driving modern American thought: namely, the question of the grounds, or foundations, for modern American thought and culture itself.” In other words, she is less interested in Nietzsche, per se, or those intellectuals who fashioned themselves “American Nietzscheans,” and more focused on those “American readers making their way to their views of themselves and their modern America by thinking through, against, and around Nietzsche’s stark challenges.”

Woessner frames his book similarly: “Heidegger’s reception tells us as much—if not more—about the course of American intellectual and cultural history over the past half century as it does about Heidegger himself.” But Woessner takes this a few steps further, in what amounts to an ambitious if not downright grandiose methodological plea. I will quote Woessner extensively to give you a taste of his strong methodological gesture.

“Detailing how Heidegger was (re)made in the U.S.A. will demonstrate how the history of ideas might be reconfigured for a new era.”

“And yet many intellectual historians continue to work as if such messy realities (that texts and contexts go together) do not impinge upon the life of the mind, as if the widest context necessitated by intellectual-historical inquiry is that of an intellectual’s biography. In doing so, they needlessly narrow the scope of the history of ideas when, in truth, intellectual history is relevant to almost all aspects of historical reality.”

“If these assumptions are correct, then it can only be beneficial to view all history of thought in terms of reception history. What the intellectual historian does, fundamentally, is trace networks of reception: he exposes hidden and not-so-hidden influences; he charts legacies of thinkers, books, ideas, discourses, and concepts.”

“All intellectual historians are interested in the fate of ideas as much as their origins, especially since every origin is always already a point of reception itself. Although the dynamics of reception are more noticeable when translation across national or linguistic boundaries occurs, because the distances between the contexts of creation and reception are often greatest in these instances, we should not lose sight of the fact that ideas are always and everywhere caught up in a process of reception.”

“From the moment an idea is expressed, either verbally or in print, it is traveling.”

What do you all make of this? Is it a new way of saying something old? Or is it a stark challenge? I’m genuinely undecided.

--------------
* My title is, of course, a riff on James Kloppenberg's classic article, "Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?"

Days of Future Past

One of the half-dozen or so books I'm in the middle of at the moment is Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks.  So far, at least, it's really terrific. Bambach addresses with care and specificity a question that has too often been answered in self-satisfied generalities: what is the relationship between Heidegger's philosophical thought (especially in the years between 1933 and 1945) and National Socialism?  Bambach closely compares Heidegger's thought to more orthodox National Socialist philosophers, noting both commonalities and differences. It's the kind of heavy-lifting, philosophically dense intellectual history that, fairly or not, I associate more with Europeanist intellectual historians than Americanists.  Moreover, it's clearly written, which is no small feat, given the subject matter (writing clearly about Heidegger being a little like summarizing Proust). 

I wanted to mention Bambach's generally clear writing because the starting point of my post today is a stylistic habit of Bambach's that I find incredibly annoying. Throughout the beginning of the book, Bambach often refers to Heidegger's writings and thoughts in the future tense.  One example, from p. 5, will suffice: 

Heidegger will consistently oppose the Nazi discourse of biological racism on philosophical grounds, since Nazi scientific-ethnological categories of blood and genetic inheritance are wholly at odds with the existential categories of Being and Time and the early Freiburg lectures.  More simply, Heidegger saw that the Nazi metaphysics of blood denied the essential historicity of a Volk by maintaining a positivist metaphysics of scientism and anthropologism in its place.

Two sentences.  Three tenses. 

I've never been a fan of the true historical present.  Talking about the past in the present tense can often be like shooting a scene through a telephoto lens.  Just as telephoto lenses tend to collapse the distance between objects in the foreground and background, the historical present tends to interfere with a clear sense of temporal difference.

On the other hand, we all refer to the content of texts in the present tense.  I have no problem with the present tense in the dependent clause of the first sentence I quoted from Bambach.  Nazi racial categories and Being and Time's existential categories still exist as categories.  Juggling this sort of use of the present tense with the historical past tense is one of the challenges of writing history, especially when one is working closely with texts as we intellectual historians tend to.

But what's Bambach doing with the future tense?  He's not expressing futurity from within his narrative, as he might be if he wrote something like "Only six short years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger would deliver his infamous Rektoratsrede."  My best guess is that the first sentence I quoted is in the future tense to avoid writing "I will show that..." or "We will see that..."  The futurity thus would be of Bambach's own book. But that's just a guess. "Heidegger will consistently oppose..." is just incredibly awkward. 

All of this got me thinking more broadly about writing and how much I do, and don't, think about it.*  I'm very conscious of working at my writing (and one of the differences between a blog post and an academic paper is that I tend to leave blog posts more raw).  But while I work at my writing, I don't actually spend a lot of time actively thinking about how to write. I study the art of writing, but I do so by reading other books and thinking about what works and what doesn't in them.  

Ari Kelman, my former colleague--and co-founder of the on-apparently-permanent-hiatus history blog Edge of the American West--used to actively study writing. I always admired his doing so and even bought a couple books he recommended on the subject. But I have to admit I never got around to reading them. 

How self-conscious are the readers of this blog about their writing?  What have you done over the years to actively improve it?  And, God help you, would you ever dream of employing the future tense when writing about events in the past?
_______________________________________________________

* A good thing, too, as this post would otherwise be little more than a cranky complaint about a tiny aspect of a book that I like a lot!

Days of Future Past

One of the half-dozen or so books I'm in the middle of at the moment is Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks.  So far, at least, it's really terrific. Bambach addresses with care and specificity a question that has too often been answered in self-satisfied generalities: what is the relationship between Heidegger's philosophical thought (especially in the years between 1933 and 1945) and National Socialism?  Bambach closely compares Heidegger's thought to more orthodox National Socialist philosophers, noting both commonalities and differences. It's the kind of heavy-lifting, philosophically dense intellectual history that, fairly or not, I associate more with Europeanist intellectual historians than Americanists.  Moreover, it's clearly written, which is no small feat, given the subject matter (writing clearly about Heidegger being a little like summarizing Proust). 

I wanted to mention Bambach's generally clear writing because the starting point of my post today is a stylistic habit of Bambach's that I find incredibly annoying. Throughout the beginning of the book, Bambach often refers to Heidegger's writings and thoughts in the future tense.  One example, from p. 5, will suffice: 

Heidegger will consistently oppose the Nazi discourse of biological racism on philosophical grounds, since Nazi scientific-ethnological categories of blood and genetic inheritance are wholly at odds with the existential categories of Being and Time and the early Freiburg lectures.  More simply, Heidegger saw that the Nazi metaphysics of blood denied the essential historicity of a Volk by maintaining a positivist metaphysics of scientism and anthropologism in its place.

Two sentences.  Three tenses. 

I've never been a fan of the true historical present.  Talking about the past in the present tense can often be like shooting a scene through a telephoto lens.  Just as telephoto lenses tend to collapse the distance between objects in the foreground and background, the historical present tends to interfere with a clear sense of temporal difference.

On the other hand, we all refer to the content of texts in the present tense.  I have no problem with the present tense in the dependent clause of the first sentence I quoted from Bambach.  Nazi racial categories and Being and Time's existential categories still exist as categories.  Juggling this sort of use of the present tense with the historical past tense is one of the challenges of writing history, especially when one is working closely with texts as we intellectual historians tend to.

But what's Bambach doing with the future tense?  He's not expressing futurity from within his narrative, as he might be if he wrote something like "Only six short years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger would deliver his infamous Rektoratsrede."  My best guess is that the first sentence I quoted is in the future tense to avoid writing "I will show that..." or "We will see that..."  The futurity thus would be of Bambach's own book. But that's just a guess. "Heidegger will consistently oppose..." is just incredibly awkward. 

All of this got me thinking more broadly about writing and how much I do, and don't, think about it.*  I'm very conscious of working at my writing (and one of the differences between a blog post and an academic paper is that I tend to leave blog posts more raw).  But while I work at my writing, I don't actually spend a lot of time actively thinking about how to write. I study the art of writing, but I do so by reading other books and thinking about what works and what doesn't in them.  

Ari Kelman, my former colleague--and co-founder of the on-apparently-permanent-hiatus history blog Edge of the American West--used to actively study writing. I always admired his doing so and even bought a couple books he recommended on the subject. But I have to admit I never got around to reading them. 

How self-conscious are the readers of this blog about their writing?  What have you done over the years to actively improve it?  And, God help you, would you ever dream of employing the future tense when writing about events in the past?
_______________________________________________________

* A good thing, too, as this post would otherwise be little more than a cranky complaint about a tiny aspect of a book that I like a lot!

Tim's Light Reading (1/21/2011)

1 (of 5). How Does Technology Change Our Thinking Patterns?

Nicholas Carr might be the best thing going for discussions on how technology, particularly the internet, influences the way we think. Check out this podcast at his blog, Rough Type, where he attempts a brief (Western) intellectual history of way that maps, mechanical clocks, and the printed book have changed our modes of perception and apprehension. Carr is perhaps best known for a bestselling book titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. None of this is earth-shattering by itself, except in that Carr has been taking lessons from the past and applying them to internet. Is anyone else doing better, or equal, than Carr in terms of reflecting on how the internet is reworking our minds?

2. What Is Jürgen Habermas' Significance To U.S. Intellectual Historians?

Courtesy of Brian Leiter's Reports, I learned that a new biography on Jürgen Habermas is out. Authored by Matthew Specter, Peter E. Gordon reviewed the book at The New Republic. Leiter believes Habermas' importance as a philosopher is overstated, but thinks that Gordon (and Specter) get Habermas' role as a public intellectual about right. The comments on the Leiter thread are of interest. I'm not knowledgeable enough about Habermas to confirm or deny statements about his importance or unimportance. And no graduate or undergraduate class of mine required Habermas, either as a book or excerpted (which amazes me). Nevertheless, I have a copy of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society on my shelf. Apparently, however, that book is more historical than philosophical, and therefore should be of interest to intellectual historians. What is the significance of Habermas to you? Or why should he be of interest to intellectual historians?

3. New Periodical: The Journal For The History Of Analytical Philosophy

Here's the site. I found these lines from the journal's self-description to be of interest (bolds mine): "JHAP takes the history of analytical philosophy to be part of analytical philosophy. Accordingly, it publishes historical research that interacts with the ongoing concerns of analytical philosophy and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions."

4. Who Is The "Americanized Heidegger"?

Courtesy again of Brian Leiter, I learned that there is a distinction in the literature between Martin Heidegger's significance in Europe versus the United States---aside from the distinction between his philosophy and personal failings (i.e. Nazism). Leiter introduces this distinction in the context of discussing a 1999 BBC documentary on Heidegger (49 minutes, Richard Rorty makes an appearance). But I suspect that we intellectual historians would be better served by tackling Martin Woessner's new book, Heidegger in America (Cambridge, 2010). Here's the blurb from the Cambridge site:

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Offering a novel account of Heidegger's place in the recent history of ideas, Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. But it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history of the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, while challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously.

5. A New Philosophy of History?

Christopher Shannon appropriates Alasdair MacIntyre's idea of tradition to introduce a new "approach to the study of the past" in the January 2011 issue of Historically Speaking. I'm eager to check this out. Have any USIH readers read the essay already? The same issue offers responses from Mark Weiner, Daniel Wickberg, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn---as well as a final rejoinder from Shannon. Aside: I love the dialectical presentation of topics in each HS issue. Mortimer Adler would've appreciated it. :) - TL

Tim's Light Reading (1/21/2011)

1 (of 5). How Does Technology Change Our Thinking Patterns?

Nicholas Carr might be the best thing going for discussions on how technology, particularly the internet, influences the way we think. Check out this podcast at his blog, Rough Type, where he attempts a brief (Western) intellectual history of way that maps, mechanical clocks, and the printed book have changed our modes of perception and apprehension. Carr is perhaps best known for a bestselling book titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. None of this is earth-shattering by itself, except in that Carr has been taking lessons from the past and applying them to internet. Is anyone else doing better, or equal, than Carr in terms of reflecting on how the internet is reworking our minds?

2. What Is Jürgen Habermas' Significance To U.S. Intellectual Historians?

Courtesy of Brian Leiter's Reports, I learned that a new biography on Jürgen Habermas is out. Authored by Matthew Specter, Peter E. Gordon reviewed the book at The New Republic. Leiter believes Habermas' importance as a philosopher is overstated, but thinks that Gordon (and Specter) get Habermas' role as a public intellectual about right. The comments on the Leiter thread are of interest. I'm not knowledgeable enough about Habermas to confirm or deny statements about his importance or unimportance. And no graduate or undergraduate class of mine required Habermas, either as a book or excerpted (which amazes me). Nevertheless, I have a copy of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society on my shelf. Apparently, however, that book is more historical than philosophical, and therefore should be of interest to intellectual historians. What is the significance of Habermas to you? Or why should he be of interest to intellectual historians?

3. New Periodical: The Journal For The History Of Analytical Philosophy

Here's the site. I found these lines from the journal's self-description to be of interest (bolds mine): "JHAP takes the history of analytical philosophy to be part of analytical philosophy. Accordingly, it publishes historical research that interacts with the ongoing concerns of analytical philosophy and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions."

4. Who Is The "Americanized Heidegger"?

Courtesy again of Brian Leiter, I learned that there is a distinction in the literature between Martin Heidegger's significance in Europe versus the United States---aside from the distinction between his philosophy and personal failings (i.e. Nazism). Leiter introduces this distinction in the context of discussing a 1999 BBC documentary on Heidegger (49 minutes, Richard Rorty makes an appearance). But I suspect that we intellectual historians would be better served by tackling Martin Woessner's new book, Heidegger in America (Cambridge, 2010). Here's the blurb from the Cambridge site:

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Offering a novel account of Heidegger's place in the recent history of ideas, Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. But it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history of the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, while challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously.

5. A New Philosophy of History?

Christopher Shannon appropriates Alasdair MacIntyre's idea of tradition to introduce a new "approach to the study of the past" in the January 2011 issue of Historically Speaking. I'm eager to check this out. Have any USIH readers read the essay already? The same issue offers responses from Mark Weiner, Daniel Wickberg, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn---as well as a final rejoinder from Shannon. Aside: I love the dialectical presentation of topics in each HS issue. Mortimer Adler would've appreciated it. :) - TL

The Benefits of Intellectual History (first in a possible occasional series)

(h/t Scott McLemee)

The Benefits of Intellectual History (first in a possible occasional series)

(h/t Scott McLemee)

Lacy On Cándida Smith: Thinking Through Modern Art

Review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8122-4188-4. 252 pages.

Review by Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2010


Thinking Through Modern Art


In The Modern Moves West, Berkeley Professor Richard Cándida Smith tackles the intellectual and cultural history of modern art in California. He explores aesthetic theory, the core-periphery tension in the institutional art world, art education, and the potentially explosive intersections of art and politics. By focusing on visual, stationary media in the work of Sam Rodia, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Noah Purifoy, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Daniel Joseph Martínez, Cándida Smith presents an incredibly rich look at California’s pantheon of twentieth-century modern artists.

To read this book is to enter a world where a particular community used painting, sculpture, and assemblage art to grapple with the acids and innovations of modernity. In relation to California and the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s notion of a “the legacy of conquest” is implicitly at work in Cándida Smith’s narrative. California is indeed a land of jostling due to internal migration, immigration, and racial politics.[1] But this book concentrates on explaining how modern art, and its postmodern successors, assisted in bringing these conflicting cultural visions together under a democratic aesthetic as the twentieth century progressed.

The Modern Moves West is a recent addition to Penn Press’s new series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America,” edited by Casey Nelson Blake. That series welcomes manuscripts “in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature.” Thus far the visual arts seem prominent, but there are only six books in the series.[2] If Cándida Smith’s contribution is indicative of the series on the whole, then that endeavor is intent on underscoring how art enriches America’s intellectual life, and how all of this comes together to foster (or hamper) democracy.

In his introduction, Cándida Smith offers a number of formulations of his thesis in relation to the themes outlined above. I believe, however, that the following ...[Continue here]

Lacy On Cándida Smith: Thinking Through Modern Art

Review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8122-4188-4. 252 pages.

Review by Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2010


Thinking Through Modern Art


In The Modern Moves West, Berkeley Professor Richard Cándida Smith tackles the intellectual and cultural history of modern art in California. He explores aesthetic theory, the core-periphery tension in the institutional art world, art education, and the potentially explosive intersections of art and politics. By focusing on visual, stationary media in the work of Sam Rodia, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Noah Purifoy, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Daniel Joseph Martínez, Cándida Smith presents an incredibly rich look at California’s pantheon of twentieth-century modern artists.

To read this book is to enter a world where a particular community used painting, sculpture, and assemblage art to grapple with the acids and innovations of modernity. In relation to California and the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s notion of a “the legacy of conquest” is implicitly at work in Cándida Smith’s narrative. California is indeed a land of jostling due to internal migration, immigration, and racial politics.[1] But this book concentrates on explaining how modern art, and its postmodern successors, assisted in bringing these conflicting cultural visions together under a democratic aesthetic as the twentieth century progressed.

The Modern Moves West is a recent addition to Penn Press’s new series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America,” edited by Casey Nelson Blake. That series welcomes manuscripts “in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature.” Thus far the visual arts seem prominent, but there are only six books in the series.[2] If Cándida Smith’s contribution is indicative of the series on the whole, then that endeavor is intent on underscoring how art enriches America’s intellectual life, and how all of this comes together to foster (or hamper) democracy.

In his introduction, Cándida Smith offers a number of formulations of his thesis in relation to the themes outlined above. I believe, however, that the following ...[Continue here]