Delving into the life of dictum

Ritterburg / Felsenschloß (1828) by Karl Friedrich Lessing

When you delve into the life of a dictum (see prev. post), you may find that it was not uttered by the person you (and everyone else) thought uttered it.

For years, for example, I thought that the winged words “back to nature!“, the credo of Romanticism and later a creed of hippiedom, can be attributed to the Swiss Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In fact, he never said such a thing.

Dictologists (I just made that up) call such errors misattributions.

There is a second misattribution of Rousseau: the term “noble savage,” found 20,000 times in Google Books alone[1]. Nowhere did Rousseau write that. As Peter Gay says “in the years I taught the history of political theory at Columbia to a sizable class of undergraduates, I would offer students a hundred dollars if they could find “Noble Savage” anywhere in Rousseau. I never had to pay up”.

The reason for these misattributions is what we call the “popular imagination,” a ‘space’ in which ideas (or memes if you want) start to live lives of their own, like urban legends, tall tales, traditional stories, myths, misconceptions and apocrypha.

Coming back to Rousseau, one has to admit that there is no smoke without fire. Indeed, Rousseau said things similar to “noble savage” and “back to nature”, as attested for example by “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil” which is the incipit of Emile, or On Education which indicates that man in state of nature is good and becomes corrupted thereafter.

And then there is Voltaire’s notorious letter to Rousseau in which Voltaire said:

“I have received your new book [The Social Contract] against the human race and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs on reading your book to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of renewing it.”

And of course, there exists an undeniable link between the “cult of nature” and Romanticism, which is best exemplified by the painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

But since that painting is known beyond cliché, I give you Ritterburg / Felsenschloß (above) by German painter Karl Friedrich Lessing.

My heart in my hands

Il Sacro Cuore, Church of the Gesù, Rome by Pompeo Batoni

I love art. I love kitsch. I love independent body parts.

Unite these three and you get Pompeo Batoni‘s uncanny painting Il Sacro Cuore (above), a depiction of Jesus who is holding his Sacred Heart in one hand and pointing to it with another. The work has become a staple of Christian art and the flaming and bleeding heart shining with divine light, pierced by the lance-wound, surrounded by the crown of thorns, surmounted by a cross, is familiar not to Christians alone.

In all honesty, when I say kitsch, I’m not being fair to Batoni, since his original work[1] (an oval portrait) is far less kitschy than the campy paintings that are derived from the original.

The visual trope of the sacred heart (with flames and blood) originates in a mystical vision by the French nun Margaret Mary Alacoque, who in 1674, described one of her visions:

“The Divine Heart was presented to me in a throne of flames, more brilliant than a sun, transparent as crystal, with this adorable wound. And it was surrounded with a crown of thorns, signifying the punctures made in it by our sins, and a cross above signifying that from the first instant of His Incarnation, […] the cross was implanted into it […].”

Jesus holding out his own heart reminds me of Denis, the patron Saint of Paris, holding his own head in his hands after he was decapitated.

One of the finest versions of the Sacred Heart is the frontispiece to De Culto Sacro Sancti Cordis Dei (above), 1726 by Charles-Joseph Natoire.

it unites art and anatomy and reminds me of  Goats & Heart (Ventriculi quatuor Caprilli) [image], a highlight from my days at Tumblr.

The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing

The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing (c.1887) by Odilon Redon, a dictum from the Pensées (1669) by Blaise Pascal

Over the course of the last six months, I’ve assembled a collection of dicta.

A dictum is an authoritative statement; a dogmatic saying; an adage, a maxim, an apothegm.

My method of collecting: Every time I read or heard or thought of an interesting dictum, I added it to the category.

There are now 200 articles in this category, a list of which you find below. 

‘

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

I cont.

L

M

N

O

P

P cont.

Q

R

S

T

U

W

Y

I took a playing card on the back of which I drew

Stendhal’s depiction of the process of falling in love, ending in crystallization from On Love[1].

What a likable drawing. And in this particular case it may even be true that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Stendhal describes or compares the “birth of love” in a new relationship as being a process similar or analogous to a trip to Rome. In the analogy the city of Bologna represents indifference and Rome represents perfect love. In the words of the narrator who writes the words of Madame Gherardi on the back of a playing card:

“While Signora Gherardi was speaking, I took a playing card on the back of which I drew Rome on one side, Bologna on the other and between Bologna and Rome, the four stages which Signora Gherardi had listed.” –tr. Isidor Schneider

Why are the towers in Bologna falling?

Mind the process of it all. The narrator (or is the narrator Stendhal himself?) hears someone speaking, takes a card and makes a drawing of what is said. Stendhal puts the words in the mouth of the narrator and reproduces the drawing. Depiction – ekphrasis – depiction.

Book illustrations are always somewhat of a pleasant surprise in works of literature. It is the only drawing in On Love, which sadly is not available in a public domain English edition.

Why read the classics?

[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I finished reading Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino, a book featuring 36 essays on classic books.

Excellent reading. Highly erudite. Such ease of narration.

Of course, I love the genre, books about books. The last I read of its kind was Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 by J. M. Coetzee[1].

Highlights, you ask?

The large essay on Stendhal and on De l’amour in particular.

That the Anabasis is a war novel.

That Twain was not much of a stylist.

That Orlando Furioso is an example of the fantastique.

A reference to the Encyclopédie des sciences inexactes by Raymond Queneau which reminded me of Umberto Eco’s pet project the Cacopedia.

And … the prose poetry of Francis Ponge:

“Kings do not touch doors. They do not know that pleasure of pushing open in front of you, slowly or brusquely, one of those big familiar rectangular panels, and turning back to close it in its place again – holding a …”
“. . . the pleasure of grabbing, at the belly of one of those tall obstacles to a room, its porcelain knob; the rapid duel in which you hold back your step for the instant it takes for the eye to open and the whole body to adapt to its new surroundings.”
“With a friendly hand you hold onto it still, before decisively pushing it back and closing yourself in another room — a feeling of enclosure which is reenforced by the click of the handle’s powerful, but well-oiled spring.”
“The Pleasures of the Door” [2]

Kant’s disinterestedness


L’indifférent (1717) by Antoine Watteau

I’ve always been baffled by Kant’s notion of disinterestedness. And then I remembered that Nietzsche was just as baffled. Here is that passage from On the Genealogy of Morality:

“Kant‘s famous definition of the beautiful. “That is beautiful,” says Kant, “which pleases without interesting.” Without interesting! Compare this definition with this other one [..] by Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. Here, at any rate, the one point which Kant makes prominent in the aesthetic position is repudiated and eliminated—le désinteressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?”

… in a garret with a leaking roof

The Poor Poet (1839), a painting by Carl Spitzweg.

Look where this sufferer from artistism, this bourgeoisophobe, this starving artist, this beautiful loser, this bohemian, this tortured artist, this seeker of artistic inspiration, this man afraid of writer’s block, look at where this poor soul ends up: in a garret with a leaking roof.

How very romantic, how utterly romantic is this notion of the Artist, the creative genius touched by divine inspiration.

Only the ugly is beautiful, only the ugly is likeable

The “Pégase romantique” caricature by Jean-Gabriel Scheffer (above) depicts from left to right  Petrus Borel, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas sitting on a giant crayfish. Or is that the  pet lobster Gérard Nerval supposedly took for walks in Paris on the end of a blue ribbon?

The motto of the caricature (top) reads ‘rien n’est beau que le laid; le laid seul est aimable,’ which translates as “Only the ugly is beautiful, only the ugly is likeable,” illustrating the cult of ugliness professed by for example Victor Hugo (“Le beau n’a qu’un type ; le laid en a mille“).

I found this image while researching the bouzingo, a group of minor French artists active in 1830s Paris. The source of the image is the excellent piece of grey lterature Pétrus Borel: Background, Reception and Interpretation[1] (1999) by Erik S. Bovee.

Bohemianism and ‘artistism’

A Paris street – set design for Act II of Puccini’s La bohème by Adolfo Hohenstein.

One of the funniest episodes in the historiography of bohemianism is the first appearance of the term bohemian in relation to artistic endeavor. The year is 1834 and Félix Pyat, a French journalist of communard persuasion, publishes a well-written article called “Les Artistes” in which he derogatorily describes wannabe artists as “alien and bizarre … outside the law, beyond the reaches of society … they are the Bohemians of today” (tr. Levi Asher).

Félix Pyat connects ‘one who lives like a Bohemian’, meaning like a vagabond, with artists and he calls the latter “les Bohémiens d’aujourd’hui” (the Bohemians of today).

The funniest bit is when he condemns artistry itself, comparing it to a disease which he calls “artistism”:

“That which should be the exception of privileged natures has become a general rule; what am I saying, a fashion, a rage, a furor, a contagious, epidemic, endemic malady, a scourge worse than cholera, a veritable plague from the Orient, artistism.” (tr. Geerinck, Daniel Cottom, 2013)

The term Bohemianism, meant as a slur by Pyat, was later reappropriated by the artistic community.

The illustration above by Adolfo Hohenstein is extremely picturesque and immediately recognizable as a French or Parisian street.