The rise of Europe

The Suez Canal

My recent immersion in human prehistory (as in the earliest posts on this blog) has deepened my notions about world literature and its connection with material progress since the navigational conquest of the Atlantic by Europeans and the discovery of the New World. The scholarly world literature industry is focused on texts, on books, on publishing, whereas Goethe's conception (in my view; see posts on this subject on my Goethe blog) was influenced by something more dynamic and progressive, by the continuing processes of transnational exchange that were in force at the beginning of the 19th century. Exchange between savants and among ordinary people had existed throughout recorded history, but the accumulation of knowledge took place with the speed with which people could travel: no faster than men could achieve by walking or on horseback. The appearance of the locomotive, which Goethe did not live to see, would vastly speed up this process, but already in the 17th century the beginnings of the postal network in Germany and in Habsburg territories had brought the countries of Europe into closer and speedier concourse with one another. Goethe's interest in the prospect of Panama and Suez canals indicates that he imagined a world-wide spread of this concourse, which would encompass the literary products of the nations. International trade was the engine of this commerce. (Click all pictures to enlarge.)

Even though trade over large areas of the earth has existed throughout recorded human history, it was carried on by middlemen operating in discrete territories. As Holger Afflerbach writes in his fascinating book Das entfesselte Meer: Die Geschichte des Atlantik:

"The Roman-Hellenistic cultures of the Mediterranean achieved a trading network with Indian merchants, in a few cases with China, which were resumed in the late Middle Ages and then took off to some extent in the early modern period. But they did not venture West. The boundaries of their cosmos was Morocco in the south and Britain in the north, even if there was local trade in the North and occasionally individual travelers who ventured to Scandinavia or even somewhat deeper into Africa. The Atlantic was simply the end of their world."

Pilgrims traveling to shrine of Thomas Becket, ca. 1400

The benefits of trade were of course enjoyed solely by "higher ups." Most people stayed where they were, excepting perhaps travel for religious reasons, and had no knowledge of foreign ways, which over millennia resulted in the deepening of regional identities, even ethnocentricism, as can be seen in the case of the early Greeks, who felt superior to surrounding natives.

What intrigues me is not simply the great expansion in knowledge of foreign peoples that resulted from the expansion of trade across the globe. It is rather that this modern expansion was fueled by Europeans. The Chinese, as Afflerbach writes, already in the early 15th century had a fleet of 3,000 war ships. They undertook seven great expeditions between 1405 and 1433. These fleets, with 20,000 to 30,000 men on board, consisted of 60 great junks that ventured to Ceylon, Sumatra, India, Hormuz and finally the coasts of Africa and Abyssinia. The Chinese were in Mecca and brought back from East Africa a live giraffe. Yet, just as quickly as they began, these expeditions ceased.

As Afflerbach writes, for economic reasons the unexplored parts of the world were of no interest. There were no gains comparable to the expenses and outlay and the incalculable dangers of such expeditions: “Die vormodernen Gesellschaften waren keine Überflußgesellschaften; sie mußten ständig mit Problemen der Massenarmut, Hunger und Seuchen fertig werden. Viel weniger als heute konnte man es sich da leisten, für Expeditionen aus purem Wissensdrang beträchtliche Summen auszugeben.” Quoting from Fernand Braudel, he writes that the length of maritime voyages even on the Mediterranean was variable. A trip from Alexandria to Venice could be made in 17 days or in 89. The “normal” time for the voyage was 55 days. Because of the perils of the sea, the Mediterranean was closed in antiquity to maritime travel from October to spring.

Area of early Portuguese Atlantic exploration

While Europe in the 15th century was still plagued by the problems of mass poverty, starvation, and plagues, trade was nevertheless vibrant in Europe, and shipbuilding had improved. The Genoans and the Venetians established colonies in Cyprus and in the Crimea, where they traded in grain. Agricultural production also began in the 15th century on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, with sugar cultivation, also using slave labor. The Europeans began to set their sights farther afield.

Dispersion of homo sapiens out of Africa

So, what does this have to do with human prehistory? The origins of homo sapiens, it seems, are in Africa, between about 200,000 and 60,000 years ago. By the latter date, some numbers of the species had begun leave Africa. Homo sapiens fossils and skeletal remains in Asia and even Australia are documented earlier than those in Europe. Thus, homo sapiens has been historically characterized by its tendency to dispersal across and possession of the earth. Yet, it took a while. That humans did not enter the New World before about 15,000 years ago may have been due to the transition of humans from hunter-gatherer and nomadic communities to quasi-permanent settlements with the rise of agriculture. And until Europe ripped the rest of the world out of its isolation, most countries were satisfied with their traditional ways of doing things. Indeed, what seems most to have interested the larger integrated political or social entities in their earliest encounters with the West –– China, the Islamic world –– was technical expertise and the utility that might gained from such expertise.

Bathing pilgrims on River Ganges before non-traditional background

In the meantime, of course, the intermixing of peoples that has been propelled by Western technology and trade continues to erode the traditional content of non-European cultures. Thus, although it appears to be a "human thing" to disperse and to mix, it is understandable that Europe is blamed for the problems that this mixing produces, especially as the speed with which it now occurs is unprecedented in human history. Yet, in prehistory already we see the tendency to disperse, to interbreed, to eliminate difference. Thus, the subtitle of Chris Stringer's book Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Human Race.

Picture credit: Gnome Planet

Reality in literature

Eurycleia washes odysseus feet

Not long ago I was looking through a recently published volume of English translations of essays by Erich Auerbach. The volume contains a range of essays, but my interest concerned the new translation by Jane Newman in this volume of Auerbach's essay on world literature. Previously, the "standard" translation was that of Edward Said. Auerbach's intention in that essay is hard to grasp, even if one has read it, as I have, in German –– several times, indeed. It is probably necessary to go back and read many of Auerbach's earlier writings to speak more definitively about what he meant by "philology of world literature," which is Newman's translation of the title. In contrast, Said rendered it as "philology and world literature." Both are somewhat odd, as is even the German title, "Philologie der Weltliteratur." After all, Auerbach is asserting that, in our globalized world, all nations and cultures are becoming homogenized, whereas (what he does not say) philology was a study of texts, particularly of the historical evolution of texts and the relationship of texts through history. Now that we have reached "the end of history" (a phrase Auerbach doesn't use, but it seems to be suggested),  the discipline of philology would appear to be irrelevant.

In this connection was another essay, "Vico and Aesthetic Historicism" (1948). We moderns, writes Auerbach, have a historically unprecedented access to all arts of the world and of all times, and our aesthetic preferences are "indiscriminate." It is not a contradiction to enjoy both Shakespeare and Sophocles, no matter the different dramatic choices of the two writers, or even such non-Western dramas as Noh and Javanese puppet plays. We enjoy for each, as he writes, “the same preparedness for understanding.” Unlike the Ancients, we do not judge art according to “certain aesthetic rules or judgments" that are shared by our contemporaries. The Greeks, when it came to art, had rules that pertained to each genre, but the same can be said of every other historical culture and to the greater civilizations, e.g., the Islamic empires, the Mayans and Aztecs, or China. Moreover, a civilization can be identified by its shared artistic ideals. Thus, philology, which exumes those ideals through texts.

The Sacrifice of Isaac (Rembrandt workshop), 1636

This week I read a review of this volume of translations. It was by Michael Wood and appeared in the London Review of Books. Wood's focus was on Mimesis, published in 1946 in German, which is the work by which Auerbach is principally known outside of Germany. It is subtitled "The Representation of Reality in Western Literature." That study begin with a chapter contrasting two stories. One is Odysseus's homecoming as described in Homer's Iliad; the other is the Old Testament account of the sacrifice of Isaac (which of course does not take place). Auerbach finds that what Wood in his review calls "the erratic, immediate reality of the inhabitants" of the earth is captured in the Biblical account, but not in Homer. On his homecoming, after all, and after a decade of amazing adventures, Odysseus is the same man he was when he left Ithaca to join the Greek fleet for Troy. As Auerbach writes of the Homeric style, it knows "only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present." In a memorable coinage, Auerbach writes that the Homeric heroes "wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives."

How different the fate of the Old Testament characters:

"[W]hat a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast!––between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealously, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues. [...] It is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality."

In connection with the representation of reality in Western literature, Wood connected this realism with a transcendent structure that does not ignore the earthly existence of humans. Real lives play out in real time, but it is time subsumed under a transcendental authority. Thus, one's character and one's fate are intertwined. One cannot escape who or what one is, quite literally in the afterlife of Dante's Inferno, in which one is condemned to repeat for eternity one's besetting character flaw.

This term irdisch (of the earth) in Auerbach is sometimes translated as "secular," which, to today's ears, lacks any suggestion of transcendence. Just the opposite. But as Wood points out, Auerbach also often uses the word "concrete" to suggest the situatedness of characters in Western literature in their milieu. But, again, human fate is carried out within that milieu. As Wood writes, however, we moderns, true secularists, are left to figure out the meaning of our lives ourselves. Some might disagree, but "individual destiny" sounds meaningless in a secular world.

Prehistoric art

Shield with guardian spirit, 1850

Lately I find myself hung up on prehistory, absorbed in the "evolution" of humankind, not in the biological sense so much as in the cultural. Clearly the two cannot be separated, and I would disagree with Colin Renfrew (see earlier posts) that humans were "set" in their genetic endowment by the time they migrated out of Africa. If I can speak as a layperson, perhaps certain "human tendencies" were embedded in the genotype.

This week I have been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is hosting an exhibition entitled "Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky." (How brave to use the word "Indian"!). Several of the works reminded me of the early cave art of Europe. For instance, compare the shield at left with the image below of a similar animal from Lascaux.

Horned animal at Lascaux

I will post the images here and let folks draw their own conclusions. (Click on links below images for Metropolitan Museum information on the works.)

Lascaux hunting scene

Drawing of artist's world, ca. 1830

Many millennia separated the two artistic manifestations, but the Indian examples would seem to be evidence of transmission of cultural products through time. What I find of interest is that Indian artists, as they developed and moved away from the early "naiveté," remained with the same artistic idiom, but went on to apply techniques that have been learned through contacts with "whites." They have become as "sophisticated" as European artists. Below are two examples.

Four Seasons Series (Winter) by Wendy Red Star) (2006)

Horse Effigy by Joseph No Two Horns (1880)

Between despair and strength

Angel of Grief, by William Wetmore Story (1894)

Or perhaps it is only a case of "zwischen Eifer und Einwand" (between enthusiasm and objection), as my friend Felicitas Hoppe expresses it in Verbrecher und Versager.

Strength is what I feel when I am at my work, with the result an essay, a review, a revision of the book I am writing. Sometimes even cooking does it for me. When I am not buoyed up by that sense of strength, in creeps that negative thing. Despair is probably hyperbole, since I am not a natural depressive, and the thought of suicide is not something that comes naturally to me. If I were dead, I would never again be able to read, to fill my mind, to write again. Intellectual activity brings me joy.  It is not surprising that I am a scholar of the Enlightenment, not of the Romantic period: my heart has never leapt to behold a rainbow in the sky. I admire the beauty, the order, and the like, all of which, especially after Rick's death, kept my mind active.

It is really sadness, a low-grade manifestation of despair, but when it arrives it is consuming. It is going on four years now that my darling husband died, and yet, in a nonce, sadness seems literally to invade me. It is said that one can die of a broken heart, and mine certainly suffered a blow.

From Descartes' De homine (1694)

It was the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) who first clarified the structure and functions of the heart. On the Circulation of the Blood (1628) not only described the systematic circulation and properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart, but it also offered powerful support for the notion that the human body was a mechanism, like a clock or like the universe. Descartes (1596–1650), a brilliant contemporary who promoted Harvey's ideas on the circulation of the blood, compared the heart to a combustion engine or a pump. The heart's status was beginning to change.

It was human reason, according to the 18th-century philosophes, that had enabled us to penetrate the laws regulating the natural world. Between Galileo (1564–1642) and Newton, even the earth lost its privileged position in the universe. The body, like the universe, was subject to regular laws; it was the task of the scientist to discover them. In the Age of Reason, emotions and passions were seen as potentially irrational, and it was seriously thought that rational men could control their influence. Aristotle had believed something similar, using the term "acrasia" (from which the English word "crazy" derives) to refer to people who made bad choices even when they knew they were wrong. By the nineteenth century, J. S. Mill claimed that the highest pleasures are those given "by the operations of the intellect and of the feelings as they blend with the intellect."

A rheumatic heart

The life of the mind, however, is a very self-centered, solitary activity. The operative pronoun is "I." In The Symposium, in which Socrates has the last word, the highest stage of love is one of self-centered intellection.

My life with Rick involved much intellectual activity, but that was only one aspect of our shared life. The heart played a greater role, and it continues to suffer.

Picture credits: Glasgow University Library; Frank Edwin

Another mystery

Cave painting from Chauvet, ca. 31,000 years BP

Continuing on the previous post: the creativity of early humans is on display in Upper Paleolithic cave art and in portable sculptures, dating to about 40,000 years ago. According to Colin Renfrew, whose book on prehistory I have been reading, it took a long time for the scholarly world of prehistorians to accept that this art was truly so old. There is earlier evidence for decorative human "patterning," in a cave in South Africa dating to 65,000 years ago, but it consists of intersecting incised lines, not of images that shows the interaction of humans with their surroundings.

What is of interest, however, is that the brilliant examples European paleolithic cave art, aside from a few exceptions, occurred only in Spain and southwestern France. Non-figurative cave art dates to 40,000 years ago at the El Castillo Cave in Spain. Animal paintings dating to 30,000 years BP (before the present) were discovered in Chauvet in France. Renfrew writes that it would be tens of thousands of years later, "some time after the inception of the  Holocene climatic phase, to see the great upsurge in rock art that then occurs."

Since those discoveries in the 19th century, scholars of prehistory have branched out all over the world, and the earliest cave paintings with comparable "sophistication" have been found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Cave art from Sulawesi (image: CC 1.0 Luc-Henri Fage)

Where am I going with these reflections on prehistory? What interests me is the issue of "transmission" of culture. Renfrew distinguishes two facets of human development. One is species specific, called "speciation, which culminated ca. 150,000 to 100,000 years ago. The skills associated with this stage include the use of fire and of stone tools, which were important in the adaptation of humans to their environment. This phase occurred before the dispersal of humans out of Africa, . Everything afterward was "tectonic," with humans building on the Homo genetic endowment, which, it seems, was "hard wired" in the human DNA.

The tectonic phase brought no change to the genome, and the rest is history: cultural evolution and the transmission of "culturally inherited" behaviors. What was there in humans, in homo sapiens in particular, that drove the species to spread throughout the earth and to transform the environment, to mold nature itself to its purposes? This subject is close to my research on a more modern aspect of this human ranging across the world, namely, "world literature," in particular Goethe's concept. What propelled world literature was another dynamic phase of human history, the overseas explorations beginning after Columbus's arrival in the New World.

The Mystery of Human Progress

The dispersal of homo sapiens out of Africa (click to enlarge)

I have been reading lately about the dispersal of homo sapiens "out of Africa," in particular the role moderns humans may have played in the extinction of our "cousins," the Neanderthals. This was the subject of a book entitled The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove the Neanderthals to Extinction, by the anthropologist Pat Shipman. Neanderthals, known as "archaic" humans, had lived in Europe and western Asia for about 200,000 years before the arrival of homo sapiens in Europe. The Neanderthals were not very evolved culturally. Even Elizabeth Kolbert, in The Sixth Extinction, admits that they spent “tens of thousands of years making the same tools over and over again.” I am reminded of Sartre’s play No Exit, in which Hell is being stuck with the same annoying people and going through the same motions for eternity. Maybe Neanderthals simply died out from world weariness.

Oldowan tools, dating to 1.7 million years ago

And now I have come across the book Humans: From the Beginning, by Christopher Seddon. In the first chapter he is considering the different "Homo" manifestations in Africa and their relationship to contemporary homo sapiens. Remains of homo habilis, for instance, do not show a very large cranial capacity; thus, there is doubt that they can be included in the line that led to homo sapiens. Homo habilis is associated with the so-called Oldowan tool industry, "the oldest and most primitive of all stone tool industries, beginning about 2.5 to 2.6 million years ago and persisting for over a million years." These tools are considered the "first generation" of stone tools" –– in other words, the most basic.

What I found of interest here, as in the case of the Neanderthals, was that this Mode 1 tool category persisted for over a million years. In other words, some poor devils –– not ape, not quite man –– never got beyond flaking stone cobbles to produce sharp stone flakes, which were only useful for cutting: animal butchery and, as Seddon writes, breaking open the animal bones to extract bone marrow. They had no tools for killing animals. So, even if homo habilis represented an advance in brain power over other hominids, including apes, one wonders what was the good of such a brain if he was now on the ground and much less advanced in obtaining food as well as in running away from bigger animals.

So, while homo habilis didn't go anywhere, evolutionarily speaking, and Neaderthals died out, what was in the genetic makeup of homo sapiens before they left Africa that they kept evolving, both genetically and behaviorally? Why have human beings progressed, and why are they the only representative of their species? In fact, we are the only species that has progressed, even if the genetic progress peaked about 70,000 years ago. Why do other animals not progress genetically or biologically?

There is a great mystery here.