Tonsor: Intellectual History: First Class: The Joy of the Intellectual Historian

I. 

Thursday, September 10th, couldn't come fast enough. It was the first day of the semester. I had been living in Ann Arbor since August 4th and was eager to start academic work.

Throughout the morning, fog and thunderclouds moved through the Huron River Valley. Although the Diag looked gloomy under a dark canopy of trees, the outermost branches of the honey locusts showed hints of the yellows soon to come under crisp autumn skies.

I arrived in East Engineering early to find a good seat for my first class at U of M: History 416, Tonsor’s Nineteenth-Century European Intellectual History. I still could not believe my good fortune to attend such a storied class. I took my place three rows back from the lectern. For the next few months, this was the space in which I would learn the most about the public Tonsor, both as a teacher and intellectual historian.

The vibe at Michigan

An affable fellow a few years my junior sat down to my left. He sported a tee shirt with a familiar slogan on campus: “Harvard, the Michigan of the East.” “Have you ever taken Tonsor before?” he asked.

“No, this is my first semester at Michigan. I get the impression we are going to learn a lot.”

“He may look like the Paddington Bear but he’s got a reputation,” the student said with a shake of his head. “He’s been known to kick trash cans at faculty meetings that don’t go his way. And when a feminist challenged him in one of his classes, he said to her face that her soul was as filthy as the floor she walked on.” My eyes inadvertently dropped to the floor. I had put myself through Colorado State University as a janitor, so I knew filth on floors.

With those two episodes in my head, I saw the barrel-chested Tonsor walk into the classroom looking vaguely harried. His head was thrust forward, and his mouth was open from walking fast and ascending the stairs to the second floor. His eyes appeared to recede behind thick lenses. He carried a brown satchel, well worn and scarred, out of which he took several books and a handwritten lecture on lined, yellow paper. I would learn that it was Tonsor’s habit to lecture from scripted notes, each topic contained in its own manila folder.[1] His final warm-up routine was to write the authors and titles of important books on the chalkboard. On this first day he wrote the following:

Roland N. Stromberg, European Intellectual History since 1789 (third ed.)
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism
Hegel, Philosophy of History
J. S. Mill, On Liberty
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, and Wagner

These were the seven books the class would read during the semester. I took note of the balance of materials: three original sources, three secondary works, and one textbook for good measure.

At 9:30 a.m. sharp, Tonsor began his lecture in the most inadvertently humorous circumstances I’d ever seen in a classroom: “Do not think,” he said importantly, just when a jackhammer started to pound away outside the window…. “Do not think,” he repeated more loudly to the jackhammer's rat-a-tat-tat…. Then, drawing himself up, he bellowed, “Do not think that it is I who am speaking to you. No, it is the Voice of History.”

East Engineering

No, actually it was the Voice of the Jackhammer. At least that’s what most of the 40 students in the class must have been thinking.

Tonsor glared at the window, fixated on the construction work on East Engineering. “You really should go to the university administration, protest this intolerable racket, and demand the refund of your tuition!”

Some of the students shifted uneasily in their chairs; others tried to laugh. His burst of temper reminded me of my father.

Composing himself, Tonsor thrust his head forward over his yellow pages of handwritten notes and resumed: “I quote Ernest Renan, one of the most interesting apostates of the nineteenth century. He abandoned the priest’s cassock for the historian’s gown. But more on the apostate Renan later.

“This course in modern European intellectual history will challenge you in fundamental ways. First, the content is more abstract than the material you've encountered in other history courses. By focusing on beliefs and knowledge, values and symbols, ideas and ideologies, we shall explore what is unique about human beings -- our capacity to imagine, to reason, to deliberate, to develop ideas -- capacities that sharply differentiate us, in kind, from the rest of the animal kingdom.

“The noisome squirrel that invades my garden has a social order; he has a sense of territory; he communicates with other squirrels; he builds nests; he mates; he eats and is eaten -- by me when I've had enough of his mischief. But there is no evidence that he thinks abstractly about his relationship to himself, to other squirrels, to the world, or to his creator. He exists in the realm of necessity, not of freedom. No matter how refined his instincts, he is incapable of creating, modifying, rejecting, or transmitting abstract ideas. He has no notion of authoring 'A History of Squirrels.'

“The second way this course will challenge you is to see that ideas change; they develop. They are not static but have a rich arc within the larger human adventure. If you were to write the history of squirrels, the story of their lives 10,000 years ago would be the same, in all the essentials, as the story of their lives today.

“Not the human story. From the drawing of cave paintings to the Neolithic Revolution and the invention of civilization forward, our way of life, our language, our society, our military technology, our economics, our politics -- all have changed, profoundly, many times over. All things human change because we think about them, criticize them, grow bored with them, and imagine something different that might make life better. The history of ideas, especially since the transition to modern times, is also one of dramatic change. It is sometimes hard for students to grasp, but what you think of liberty in 1987 is not what French revolutionaries thought of liberty in 1793. What you think of equality today is not what coffeehouse Marxists thought of equality in 1848. What you think of the Constitution on its two hundredth anniversary is not what citizens thought of the Constitution two centuries ago.

"The third challenge is related to the second. Because you are going to become more aware of changes in human thinking, I hope this course encourages you to break out of your familiar, limited way of seeing things. History is a core discipline of a liberal arts education precisely because it frees you from the fallacy of presentism, the belief that you should judge the people of the past by the standards of the present. In this history course, you will be urged to develop the habit of sympathetic identification with those who lived in the past; to try to put yourselves in their shoes; to understand them on their terms, not yours; to comprehend their way of thinking, not yours. Otherwise, once you fall back into your conceptions of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, you cease to think historically. You lack perspective, and without perspective, your worldview is impoverished."

Tonsor then turned to the board and wrote in large letters, “Einfühlung.” “Einfühlung,” he said slowly, “is German for 'sympathetic understanding' -- one of the most important concepts in the study of history, and we shall recur to it often.”

He resumed reading from his notes. “The fourth way this course will challenge you is to see that it's the changes in the way we think that make other changes possible. We shall discover that changes in the mind often precede changes in society, the economy, politics, military strategy, and so forth. Changing the way people think is one of the most revolutionary things you can do. If a people think Copernicus describes reality better than Ptolemy does, and change their mind about astronomy; if a people think Newton describes reality better than Aristotle does, and change their mind about physics; if a people think Darwin describes reality better than Genesis does, and change their mind about life on earth; if a people think Lister describes reality better than Galen does, and change their mind about medicine; if a people think Madison describes reality better than Plato does, and change their mind about politics; then that people will create a different world than would have existed otherwise.

"I also hope that you will learn to see the intended and unintended consequences of ideas. The Enlightenment went far to dethrone divine revelation and, in its place, enthrone experimental science. The philosophes did so thinking that reason was a better guide to reality than the faith and obedience called for in Genesis. But Pascal observed that the heart has its reasons that reason cannot comprehend. Sometimes man is moved to think and act in a way that is contrary to the dictates of reason or conventional wisdom. When John Dalton formulated atomic theory, he saw its useful applications but never dreamed of 'the bomb.'

“We can see how ideas have consequences in a contentious matter before the American people today. Our Constitution does not interpret itself. Whether your senator votes to confirm Judge Robert Bork, President Reagan's nomination for the Supreme Court, depends in part on whether he believes in a strict or loose interpretation of our fundamental law. Each of these interpretations has consequences.

"I quote John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory [1935-1936], final paragraph:

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the general encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."

“Fifth and finally, I hope this lecture course in modern European intellectual history challenges you to follow the Delphic inscription, 'know thyself.' Know thyself, not in the self-indulgent way of the therapy culture, but in a deeply humanistic way.

"In readings and lectures we will encounter a series of revolutions. More specifically, we will account for dramatic changes in European thought from the Enlightenment to the advent of Romanticism around 1750. From Romanticism we shall turn to positivism and then to the anti-positivist revolt in the 1870s. We shall consider the content of the determinative ideas in culture and society. And we shall also attempt to provide an explanation for the many ideological changes that occurred before, during, and after the French Revolution. There is heavy emphasis on the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism as well as on the emergence of Realism and Naturalism. As you grapple with each of these -isms over the next fifteen weeks, you will recognize yourselves and understand better where your own ideas, values, and beliefs come from.

"I hasten to add a caveat. It is well to remind ourselves that it is given to historians the possibility of seeing only a portion of the truth of the age they are studying. For all their great insights and achievements, our great historians remain children of their age. In our day they are typically bourgeois, liberal, and some denomination of Protestant. That their vision is partial and incomplete should not surprise us. That they are occasionally able to rise above some of the obscuring mists of their time is surprising enough.[2]

"There will be regular class discussions of the texts -- you can see that I've written them on the board. Your participation will constitute one-quarter of the grade. Your mastery of the material will also be evaluated by a midterm examination and by a final examination. Be sure to bring blue books on exam days.”[3]

The Paddington Bear: Stephen J. Tonsor (1923-2014)

In these first few minutes I noted that Tonsor pronounced certain words the way Catholics from south Saint Louis do. His “or” sounded like “are”; his “for” like “far”; his “order” like “ardor.”

“During our time together, we will challenge an idea that arose in the Enlightenment and attracted many apostles in the nineteenth century. It's the idea that history is the story of unending progress. Students today may think that it is, but it is not. Civilized men forever contend with barbarism. As a professor of mine used to say, quoting Virgil to the ordinary Illinois farm-boy and farm-girl types whom he taught, ‘sunt lacrimae rerum – things have tears in them.’”[4]

Once Tonsor settled into his lecture, he commanded the room. I thrilled at his rhetorical strategy, which was a study in definition. He laid before us the key terms of the course, elucidating on “nineteenth century,” “modern,” “European,” and “intellectual history.” The most memorable image in this first half hour of the lecture was borrowed, he explained, from his most influential professor at Illinois, Joseph Ward Swain. “The study of history is like driving a car, in reverse, at night. Looking through the rearview mirror, you can only see a narrow section of a dimly lit road already traveled. What is more, the farther back you go, the dimmer the light. Holding that analogy in mind, you will understand why even the most rigorous research must be wedded to the imagination. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, there is no good history without imagination.”

II.

I was writing furiously, using the shorthand system that I had taught myself as an undergraduate and capturing every syllable I could. Relief came in the form of a fascinating digression when a woman raised her hand.

"Yes," Tonsor said with a note of impatience that would have done Professor Kingsfield proud. 

"I'm having trouble with the notion of intellectual history as a discipline. Isn't it hard to prove anything that you can't see and touch? I mean, you mention the importance of imagination, but how can a historian document another person's imagination?"

"Through the symbolic record the other person leaves behind," said Tonsor, "through music, art, architecture, sculpture, poems, novels, essays, and letters. Tell me: Have you ever written a letter to a friend that expresses your feelings? Neither you nor your friend nor anyone else could see the emotions, per se, but they burned inside you and you found a way to express them symbolically, in the words you composed. Don't you think your friend understood the non-material thoughts and feelings you expressed symbolically? 

"I want the class to take note of the important question this young lady raises. History is not like the physical sciences that apply reason to the sensate physical and chemical world, a world of necessity. Nor is history like the social sciences that apply statistics to human characteristics and behavior as though we were only a herd animal. Are you not more than a herd of cows?"

The class laughed.

"No," said Tonsor, "history does not preoccupy itself with the realm of necessity nor with the ethology of herds. It is neither a natural science nor a social science. Rather, history is a humanistic inquiry. It seeks to understand man as he exists in the realm of freedom: the way he sees the world, the choices he makes, the efforts to satisfy his will. What is more, history seeks to decipher the symbolic ways we have created meaning and imparted wisdom over time -- through music, art, architecture, reading, conversation, study, research, and writing. It follows that history is an exploration of the temporal depths of culture. It seeks to comprehend the way tradition, order, and continuity are in tension with disruption, disorder, and change. Yet another way history is a humanistic inquiry is that it respects the individual human person and the difference one person can make. When the historian is writing biography, he tries to get inside his subject's thoughts, feelings, and imagination."

"But," the woman persisted, "tell me more about how the historian studies thoughts, feelings, and imagination? They are not visible to the senses."

"Listen," said Tonsor, showing more energy now that he was challenged, "what we cannot see is often more powerful than what we can see. Do your parents love each other?"

"Yes," the woman said, wondering how the conversation would turn.

"While you can see both of your parents, you cannot see the love between them, per se. Right? But you infer their love by observing the way they have committed to one another, speak to one another, care for one another, help one another, write little love notes to one another, and enjoy each other's company. It is love, yes? You know it is love, right, even though you cannot see the thing directly?" 

"I suppose so."

"Love -- like beauty, truth, goodness, friendship -- exists in our consciousness; it is relational; the Platonists and theologians would say it first inhabits the very mind of God. It is not something to be measured on a physical scale but rather is apprehended by our feelings, our mind, our soul, our illative sense.[5] That is what makes it transcendent -- it is above and beyond the sensate world and yet can be inferred by its effects in the sensate world.

"Alfred, Lord Tennyson famously put the matter this way: 

Nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven...."[6]

I was reminded of the words of a hymn:

Eye has not seen, ear has not heard
What God has ready for those who love Him.[7]

III.

Our introduction to intellectual history.

After this exchange, Tonsor tried to whet his students’ appetite for the first text we'd cover -- a doozy of a read -- Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. I don't know how persuasive he was with most of the undergraduates -- they were not exactly kittens discovering the bowl of cream. I'd wager he spoke over their heads. But he was clear and direct.

“If you are like the thousand or so students who have preceded you in this class, then you will find this first reading difficult. This is a good thing -- you would not learn if it were not difficult.” Tonsor added, sotto voce, “Herr Doktor Professor Cassirer will no doubt cull the less serious scholars from the class.” The sarcasm in the word “scholars” seemed to reverberate as much as the jackhammer had.

It’s true. Cassirer's Enlightenment was even more intimidating than our professor. At home that night I would discover that it was the most difficult book I had yet encountered in my academic career.[8] On second thought that's not true -- it couldn't hold a candle to college calculus. Cassirer was, more precisely, the most difficult author I had yet encountered in the humanities. Importantly, in this first lecture Tonsor used Cassirer to demonstrate one of the things intellectual historians do: They clothe naked ideas in their biographical, historical, social, cultural, and philosophical finery.

Among the highlights from Tonsor's heavy-hitting first lecture:

“In the book you will learn about the original Enlightenment project in the eighteenth century. In the author you will learn about a reconstituted enlightenment project in the twentieth century. The link between book and author will help you understand the continuity and change of Enlightenment ideals over three centuries.” I thought: This is brilliant pedagogy. Tonsor is assigning a book that is unsurpassed in the secondary literature of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, by an author who was himself a primary source in an attempted twentieth-century enlightenment.

Nazi Germany (1933-1945)

"Hear the gravamen of Cassirer's brief. Like many of his contemporaries, he felt the sense of doom, the fracturing of civilization in the modern age. It was evident in two world wars; in the incompatible -isms that proliferated; and in the antihuman philosophies that propagated. British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey captured the spirit of the age: 'The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.' It was in this dark age -- yes, this dark age -- that Cassirer pondered whether the Enlightenment project, chastened and renewed, might not help civilization come through the crisis. The fact that the project did not entirely succeed tells us something important."

Then Tonsor tried to convey the romance of intellectual history -- an important undertaking because, by the 1980s, intellectual history was passé and took a back seat to social history. “It may surprise you to learn that bookish scholars can be heroes. But I tell you that Cassirer was a hero. In an atmosphere of decline and fall – first of Weimar Germany then of the Third Reich – he sought to preserve the best of German civilization: the liberal, humanistic Germany built up by Kant, Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and other leaders of the Aufklärung. After the catastrophes of World War I and the twenties, he watched the Weimar Republic weaken and become susceptible to the Nazi takeover. Yet he was not passive in the face of the rising irrationality and violence. Writing The Philosophy of the Enlightenment with urgency in the early 1930s, he sought to fortify Weimar’s cultural immune system to resist Nazi ideas and symbols. He and other intellectual leaders did not succeed in stopping Hitler, of course, and Cassirer even took the fall of the Weimar Republic as a personal defeat.[8] Yet his work would assist Germany in its odyssey back to civilization following the world wars. That’s one reason why The Philosophy of the Enlightenment remains an exemplar to this day. You don’t know whether you, too, may someday be called to serve your fellow man in this profoundly important way. In Cassirer you might find a heroic model of intellectual and moral courage.”

“Cassirer wrote about the Enlightenment at the University of Hamburg, an unlikely place for a renascence of anything resembling enlightened thought. The poet Heinrich Heine said that Hamburg, a city of merchants, is where poets go to die."

“Although he was a contradiction to his age, Cassirer was an important cultural thinker prior to his death in 1945, and he remains so now. Cassirer came of age when modern philosophers had dug a Grand Canyon between the sciences and humanities. Peering into the vast rift between these two ways of knowing, he conceived the improbable task of building a bridge that would once again link the two rims of this philosophical canyon. We must give Cassirer credit for his audacious attempts to reconcile physical nature with the human spirit, the exact sciences with the arts, the objective with the subjective, reason with passion, analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. In the fractured modern age, he was a reconciler. To integrate all knowledge was one of the great Enlightenment projects; the goal of all the great humanists. Cassirer, arguably the greatest German humanist of his generation, was uniquely qualified to revive the Enlightenment project. Even if the project ultimately failed, his ambitious effort to unify the sciences and the humanities – to reunite the knowledge and truth on both sides of the epistemological canyon – was a heroic effort to restore the cultural unity of the West.”

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

Tonsor next said he hoped we'd find ourselves “arguing” with Cassirer during the entire course, from the first class to the last. “Ernst Cassirer was part of the revolt against Auguste Comte and the array of positivist ideas that were so influential in nineteenth-century Europe.[10] Positivism confines itself to the data of the senses and of experience. If you are an atheist, you are probably a positivist. Cassirer argued that the stakes of the anti-positivist revolt to Western civilization were high: If positivism went unchecked, if there were no anti-positivist revolt, then man would eventually regard himself merely as a material being. His free will, his moral agency, his spiritual life – all would suffer. This is an internal argument that each of you must also settle. And you thought that intellectual history would be dry!”

The lecture took a personal turn when Tonsor told the class he read Goethe every day. Indeed, it was his regular reading of Goethe that helped him understand Cassirer. For Cassirer was also devoted to Goethe and read him religiously.

"Each morning, as I dress," Tonsor seemed moved to reveal, "I read a passage from Goethe. It is from the book, Mit Goethe durch das Jahr, and I am much struck by his writing and his wisdom. It is odd, this relationship with a man so long dead. Yet he has become very familiar to me."[11]

Permit me to use this thought to push the fast forward button three decades, to 2016, as I write these reflections on my years in Ann Arbor. It has been a delight to discover a resurgence of interest in Ernst Cassirer. Young scholars have recently written several excellent books that argue for his centrality to twentieth-century intellectual history. Stephen Tonsor was one of only a handful of intellectual historians who stressed Cassirer's importance back in the 1980s.

Among these young scholars is Edward Skidelsky whose important 2008 book on Ernst Cassirer reminded me of Tonsor's first lecture in History 416. Like Tonsor, Skidelsky discusses how Goethe was resurrected at the end of World War II as the lost hero of a former Germany, an enlightened, liberal, humanistic Germany. It was no accident that Weimar was chosen to be the home of the first German Republic following World War I – it was Goethe’s home as well and thus highly symbolic of the promise of German humanism. Also after World War II, the historian Friedrich Meinecke proposed public readings of Goethe as a form of national reeducation after the Nazi years. German intellectual leaders like Cassirer looked to Goethe to recall Germany to the ideals of the Enlightenment and to its humanistic promise.[12]

A passage Skidelsky quotes by Cassirer’s wife, Toni Cassirer, is particularly apt:

The Greatest
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

“His interpretation of history; his feeling for nature; his ongoing endeavor to broaden his outlook, to extend his knowledge to almost all fields so as to strengthen his judgment and guard it against all one-sidedness, to free it from the influence of parochial experience, to distance it from the events of the day – all this derived from Goethe. His firm faith in the value of human personality, his longing for form and harmony, his abhorrence of violent destruction – both of his own ego and of the surrounding world – his loathing of ideological, political, and religious slogans – in short, everything that constituted the essence of his being, came from Goethe. I learned to understand Goethe through Ernst and Ernst through Goethe.”[13]

Could this quotation about a scholar's immersion in Goethe get at something in the core of the professor standing before us?

Exactly one minute before class was to end, Tonsor wrapped up. Cassirer, he intoned in his peroration, was one of the giants of twentieth-century intellectual history. Of Jewish parentage, his early grounding in the liberal arts prepared him for graduate study in history, literature, and philosophy, which he would skillfully integrate throughout his career. Many of his best works, including The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), were written in Weimar Germany, at the University of Hamburg, where he also supervised young Leo Strauss’s doctoral dissertation – another seminal thinker in the intellectual community I was learning about. Cassirer's warning against dismissing Enlightenment thought, on the eve of the Nazi takeover, made the book as poignant as it was significant. Because he was Jewish, he was part of the diaspora out of Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933. “Central and eastern Europe,” concluded Tonsor, “never recovered from the diaspora and attendant loss to culture.”

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)

---

Notes

[1] In this classroom habit Tonsor followed his mentor. See his essay, “Joseph Ward Swain,” in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), ed. Gregory L. Schneider, p. 311.

[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Albert Schweitzer and the Crisis of Protestant Liberalism," unpublished lecture, no date, p. 13. Tonsor was always denigrating his work. In the March 21, 1989, prefatory note to his colleague David Hollinger, he wrote about the lecture: "I am certain it will be a disappointment to you -- as it was for me." I am grateful to David Hollinger for mailing me his copy of this lecture of Tonsor's in early November 2016.

[3] URL http://www.lsa.umich.edu/saa/publications/courseguide/fall/archive/Fall87.cg/390.html, accessed September 7, 2016

[4] Tonsor, “Joseph Ward Swain,” in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, p. 312.

[5] John Henry Newman, Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Ascent (London: Burns, Oates, 1874), Chapter 9, pp. 266ff.

[6] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Ancient Sage," ll. 36-37.

[7] Marty Haugen's hymn is drawn from Paul, 1 Corinthians 2:9.

[8] To provide context to Tonsor's lecture on Cassirer in History 416, I am most indebted to and grateful for the background information and insights provided by Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

[9] Skidelsky, Cassirer, pp. 212-13.

[10] Skidelsky, Cassirer, p. 1.

[11] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, February 15, 1986, p. 3; in GW's possession courtesy of Alfred Regnery.

[12] Skidelsky, Cassirer, p. 76.

[13] Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim, Germany: Gerstenberg, 1981), p. 87; trans. and quoted by Skidelsky, Cassirer, p. 240.

Tonsor: Intellectual History: Goethe III

I.

After the bus returned me to the North Campus, I ignored all the books I'd brought home except Faust. Tonsor had gotten my attention when he said he read Goethe every morning; regarded the Weimar poet as a worthy "mentor and model"; and paraphrased Matthew Arnold to the effect that "Goethe was by far our greatest modern man ... the thinker who, more than any other, interpreted the modern world to itself."[1] 

At this point the distinction between literary criticism and literary history seems apt. The former is about literature that endures by raising questions with which each new generation wants to grapple. The latter is about literature that raised questions with which the author's generation wanted to grapple.[2] Given its critical reception generation after generation, there is no doubt which category Goethe's Faust is in. Let's grant that it was a masterpiece when it came to interpreting the modern world to itself. Yet that was then, in the modern age. We were all postmoderns now.[3] To what extent did the drama continue to have the poetic power to interpret the present, postmodern age to itself? 

That was one question. Another was what Goethe and Faust can teach us about what came before postmodernity. Surely the drama's power is revealed in its critique of modernity -- especially in Faust's encounter with Philemon and Baucis. This old couple from ancient Greek mythology was made famous by Ovid in Metamorphoses. Goethe appropriates the story to make a moral point about Faust's "Faustian" ambition to transform a coastal wasteland into the world's breadbasket. To do so will require flexing modern technology's muscle to reclaim the land -- and also evicting the lovely Philemon and Baucis, known for their sacrificial hospitality, from their humble cottage. The eviction is carried out by thugs who kill the old couple. By showing us Faust's totalitarian ambition and absolute power over Philemon and Baucis, Goethe seems to be confronting modernity for its arrogant and ruthless quest for "progress"; by extension he seems to be criticizing modernity for killing off the West's classical heritage, symbolized by Philemon and Baucis's deaths. These two damning indictments of the modern spirit proved prophetic. 

Also, in interpreting the modern West to itself, how did Goethe navigate Western civilization's two competing sources of authority, Christendom and the Enlightenment? The poet witnessed in his life (1749-1832), on the one hand, the mythic power of Christendom; on the other, the rational force of the Enlightenment; and they were in dynamic tension with one another. While Faust was informed by elements of both -- both Christendom and the Enlightenment -- Goethe was taken in by neither. He was not a fan of the institutional churches Protestant or Catholic, nor did he swallow the Enlightenment hook, line, and sinker. Yet it is precisely his critical distance from these two competing sources of authority that made him such an interesting commentator on them in isolation and in relation to one another. Examining that dynamic tension in Goethe was one of the ways Tonsor wanted me to confront modernity. Consider:

Christendom looked back to the past and carried the burdens of history with humility; the Enlightenment looked forward to the future expecting to muscle mankind toward ever brighter social conditions (the aspiration of the great reclamation project). 

Christendom redeemed man's failures in time by raising them to a higher spiritual plane; the Enlightenment achieved redemption by shaking off the burden of history. The aim was to learn from mankind's past failures. And the Enlightenment did -- perhaps a little too glibly, a bit too arrogantly -- confident that its way would lead to a better world than any of the alternatives. 

Christendom could be pessimistic about change. The Church knew that with every advance in the name of progress, something of great value was lost; progress was stalked by tragedy, so Christendom emphasized continuity. The Enlightenment in its optimism believed otherwise: It emphasized change as necessary to betterment here on Earth. 

Indeed, wasn't Faust a tragedy so long as it embraced the Enlightenment's secular values, seen most poignantly in the great reclamation project's ruthless treatment of Baucis and Philemon? Wasn't it in fact a comedy (in Dante's sense) when it embraced Christendom's transcendent values, which assured the salvation of Gretchen's and Faust's souls? 

II. 

Before talking to Tonsor, I thought I knew Faust enough to be conversant. As an undergraduate, I was taught the conventional modernist interpretation: that Faust unfolds entirely within a naturalistic setting; that the symbolic spiritual characters at the beginning and end of the play are just that -- symbolic -- allegorical references that do not upend the "natural supernaturalism" that tied Goethe's worldview together.[4]

After talking to Tonsor and reading several critical essays in the book I brought home, it was apparent that I knew Faust hardly at all. How could I? Goethe tells us he conceived of Faust in his twentieth year and revised it up through his eighty-second year. It is the work of a lifetime, the monument to his genius, and at the same time maddeningly difficult. "Incommensurable" is how he himself described the drama. Perhaps it is telling that Goethe described his work as "fragments of a great confession."[5] A confession of what? Perhaps it is even more telling that he described Faust as "an evident riddle" that would "delight men on and on and give them something to work at" -- itself a Faustian project if ever there were one.[6]

And now I find myself laboring over the riddle that has preoccupied generations of scholars. My first question is whether Faust challenges modern readers with a binary choice -- a stark "either-or": either the naturalism of the neopagans who emerged from the Enlightenment, or the transcendence of earlier generations of Jews, Christians, and Renaissance Neoplatonists? 

But then I realized that was the wrong question. Integral humanist that he was, Tonsor was teaching me to reject "either-or" thinking and instead embrace "both-and" thinking. This hermeneutic of dynamic tension was consistent with the tradition of the humanities, which foster widening circles of interpretation rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of ideologues. So when it came to Faust, Goethe invited modern audiences to judge the characters and plot in the light of both Enlightenment values and Christendom's values. Goethe seemed to be shining the light of the transcendent onto the secular modern project, wanting his audience to deal with both. 

A strictly naturalistic interpretation of Faust is contradicted by the internal evidence of the play. In the text are unreconciled tensions that should open us up to explore the ambiguities and ambivalences in the modern project. From the beginning of Part I to the end of Part II, Goethe uses images, iconography, ideas, and language that affirm not just the naturalistic, but also the transcendent -- even a kind of Renaissance Neoplatonism -- which might serve to link the naturalistic and transcendent elements together.

This interpretation, I hasten to add, does not rely on Goethe himself believing in transcendence and Renaissance Neoplatonism. True, Goethe worked on the play for some six decades, from the start of the Urfaust in 1769 to the final revision of Part II in 1832, so all manner of Enlightenment and Romantic ideas made their way into the work. We know, moreover, that the young Goethe was fascinated with Renaissance Neoplatonism, Protestant mysticism, and alchemy. But our interpretation of the play need not rely on any of these biographical nuggets. Rather we should ask: What do we see with our own eyes? What does the internal evidence of the drama say about the relationship between the natural and transcendent?

Goethe pushes his audience into an encounter with the transcendent in the very first lines, at the beginning of Part I, and he drives his audience higher and higher into the transcendent with images, iconography, ideas, and language at the end of Part II. Thus a close reading of Faust supports Tonsor's integral humanistic interpretation of the play -- a "both-and" hermeneutic that weaves together the contrary threads one finds in the immanent and transcendent, time and eternity, secular and sacred, Earth and Heaven, creation and God.

Other "both-and" tensions that Goethe invites us to explore are the Enlightenment vis-a-vis Romanticism, classical pagan Greece in tension with medieval Christian Europe, and premodern beliefs alongside modern skepticism.

Goethe was a great poet, in no small part, because of his keen awareness of these tensions and conflicts, these ambivalences and ambiguities, that characterize the human estate. The fact that this complexity informs his treatment of the characters and worldviews in the play is precisely what appealed to Tonsor. 

Goethe's ambiguous Faust reminds me of Shakespeare's similarly ambiguous Hamlet, where the characters' conflicting values cannot be painted over or easily reconciled.[7] To ignore the ambiguity and tension in Goethe's drama is to do violence to the play by forcing it into the straitjacket of ideology -- which in the humanities is the equivalent to committing a capital crime.

III. 

In the face of all the authoritative naturalistic readings of Faust, the burden is on the integral humanist -- a humanist who looks at man as both a material and spiritual being -- to look at the evidence afresh and see if a compelling case can be made for both matter and spirit in the work. Tonsor nudges me in the direction of integral humanism, which searches out the relationship between the naturalistic and the transcendent in images, iconography, ideas, and words. When it comes to Goethe's Faust: 

• We see the transcendent in the fact that the play has an omnipotent God -- a personal God who oversees the cosmos and the afterlife. He must approve Mephistopheles's proposal. Thus it is not a play that will make atheists feel reassured about denying the existence of God.  

• We see the transcendent in the fact that the characters have souls. Naturalism would contest the idea of an immaterial soul, arguing that science has yet to discover a soul that can be separated from consciousness at death. But the worldview of the play counters naturalism with an older anthropology. That anthropology sees a desiring soul whose eternal destiny is determined, not so much by the actions in this life, as by a kind of Final Judgment at the gateway to the next.  

• We see the transcendent in the character of Mephistopheles, the Devil whose two-fold purpose is to undo the work of creation and to negate man's belief in the transcendent. More specifically his goal is to steer man's striving soul away from God, the source of his being, to the endless pursuit of material, worldly, pseudo-satisfactions. No doubt, many nineteenth-century readers would have read Faust with St. Augustine somewhere in their heads, who famously wrote: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."[8] 

• We see the transcendent in the first wager, the one between God and Mephistopheles, over Faust's soul. It is treated as a prize of incalculable value. Mephistopheles and God would not contend over Faust's soul if the stakes were merely over corruptible, finite matter as opposed to an eternal spirit.  

• We see a hint of the transcendent in the suggestion that the soulless and nihilistic Mephistopheles is inferior even to the alchemically created little man, the Homunculus, born from a test tube.[9]  

• We see the transcendent in the images, iconography, ideas, and language of the Prologue, which takes place in Heaven, as well as in the conclusion, which returns to Heaven. The play's bookends do not present merely a symbolic Heaven because a merely symbolic Heaven would rob Faust of its drama. If the action in the end is just symbolic, why should we care?    

 I also wondered about Goethe calling his play a tragedy. If the reader confined himself to the naturalism that dominates most of the play, it would indeed be a tragedy. In naturalistic terms the story of Faust does not end well. In naming the play, I think Goethe was following his idol, Shakespeare. The Bard signaled that his play was a tragedy if the title was the main character's name: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello. Thus Goethe titled his play Faust to signal that it is a tragedy, which is true if one follow's only Faust's natural life span.

But as readers know, the play's real meaning is not revealed within Faust's natural life span. At Faust's death, God in his mercy intervenes, tricks Mephistopheles, and arranges for the angels to snatch Faust's immortal soul away from certain damnation. What was a tragedy in its naturalistic setting becomes a comedy in the cosmic setting -- a comedy because it has a happy ending for the main character of the play.

The fact that Faust reveals itself, in the end, to be a comedy is a powerful argument for the transcendent. Nothing Faust does can make this unexpected turnabout happen. It is entirely God's doing. The surprising final scenes are a rebuke to the naturalists who have fallen short of understanding the fullness of reality.

IV.

Now, when it comes to transcendence, Faust does not just lead modern audiences into the foggy heights. No, the transcendent is detailed in sharp relief. I would argue that it is a syncretic transcendent that combines concepts found both in traditional Catholicism and in Renaissance Neoplatonism.  

• We see Catholic traces in Gretchen's intercessory prayers. The reader encounters her in Heaven, praying for Faust's soul in exactly the way Catholics through the ages have been taught that the communion of saints prays.  

• We see Catholic traces in the allusion to a very traditional Purgatory. Goethe's Purgatory with its hosts looks a lot like Dante's holy mountain in the Purgatorio. Its purpose is to be a school of virtue and holiness for the soul, to prepare the soul to encounter a transcendent God in a transcendent Heaven.  

• We see Catholic traces in play's insinuation that the socialists and progressives strive for perfection on Earth in vain. Utopian schemes cannot remake human nature. Technology cannot conquer the evil in the human heart. Such measures always fall short of the true progress a society could theoretically achieve. In light of Faust's land reclamation project near the end of the play, the messages seems to be that real, lasting progress only takes place in the soul of one who has struggled to become holier on Earth and who finishes the work in a spiritual Purgatory that prepares his soul for Heaven.  

• We see Catholic traces in the last lines about "Eternal Womanhood" that "draws us on high" -- surely an allusion to the Virgin Mary.  

• We see Catholic traces not directly in an encounter with Jesus, but indirectly by the presence of his holy believers in Heaven. By this indirection, Goethe was less likely to offend the modern sensibilities of his readers.

V. 

Thus far we have seen how the internal evidence in Faust reveals several interesting things. The play does not support a strictly naturalistic worldview; nor an anti-theistic worldview; nor even an anti-Catholic worldview. Rather, the play is set in a complex cosmos of Goethe's creation, a syncretic vision that is characterized both by immanent nature and by transcendent spirit. As we have seen, the latter seems vaguely informed by Catholic dogma and doctrine, even though Goethe was not a Catholic. 

As surprising as the Catholic allusions may strike some readers, perhaps even more surprising is the Renaissance Neoplatonism worked into the play, like yeast kneaded into flour.

• There are frequent references to illumination -- from candles to the sun -- that the Neoplatonists are known for. 

• Also in the course of the play, Faust learns that in this life he will never behold the Absolute (the sun) directly, but only through the mediation of the world. This is the meaning of the famous scene when Faust sees the sun's light refracted into all the colors of the rainbow. 

• We see the Neoplatonism, finally and most convincingly, in the Mystic Choir's last speech of the play. "All that passes is only a parable." Could Goethe be any clearer? Reality is most fully encountered in transcendence, in Heaven, in the Neoplatonists' sun. It is least fully encountered in earthly things that are distant from the sun. 

The critics who argue that the play takes place strictly within a naturalistic world need to explain the transcendence, Catholicism, and Renaissance Neoplatonism that infuse the work, especially at the end. "All that passes is only a parable." This line of verse can only mean that the symbolism in Faust flows not from the material world to a symbolic spiritual world, as is frequently argued -- not at all. The Neoplatonic symbolism in Faust flows in the opposite direction -- from the real spiritual world to the symbolic natural world.

Thus no arrangement in the material world -- no Utopia, no commune, no social engineering, no project to perfect a man or a people -- can fulfill the striving soul. In fact, any such effort is likely to corrupt the striving soul.

Tonsor had told me that morning: "It was Oswald Spengler, reading Goethe, who discerned the distinctive character of Western culture: It was Faustian because of the way it inspired the striving soul to engage in unceasing though ultimately unsuccessful effort to conquer nature -- including human nature. For when the godly myth of love is displaced by the demonic myth of power, there is a near certainty that the consequences will be disastrous. And yet that precisely is the mythic displacement which increasingly characterizes the modern world."[10]

A profoundly wise insight, this.

VI.

So even though Faust is about an increasingly naturalistic West, it is not ultimately a naturalistic play, despite what most critics say. Ninety-nine percent of the action may take place in naturalistic, indeed Romantic, settings, but the reader must account for the one percent of the play that is transcendent and that gives the play most of its meaning -- even if it offends modern sensibilities.

Now, I do not wish to carry the spiritual argument to absurd lengths. The tragedy does not mirror the Catechism; it would not be compelling if it did. It does not rubber stamp Christian dogma; it's fiction and it shouldn't. It is not a picture of Renaissance Neoplatonism; it would lose its relevance it if were. But -- this was Tonsor's point -- a fair reading of Faust should not alienate people persuaded by a Neoplatonic cosmology or a Christian worldview.

Would it be absurd to wonder whether Goethe's was studying Catholic doctrine at the end of his life, when he was composing the final scenes of the tragedy? Was he meditating on the final scenes of his own life? Would it be a stretch to suggest that Goethe was taking one of the most important sets of readings in the liturgical cycle, about God's mercy for all human beings, and applying the lesson to Faust? Many commentators have been disturbed by how easy it is for Faust's soul to be saved at the end of the play, considering what a self-centered, unethical man he has been throughout most of the work. Our sense of justice may justifiably be offended. But scripture has declared that "God's ways are not man's ways."[11] At a crucial turning point in the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah declares that God's mercy is not just for His Chosen People, Israel, but for all human beings.[12] There is a similar turning point during the ministry of Jesus, when he shows mercy to two despised foreigners, the Canaanite woman and her daughter, over the protests of his disciples who want to send them away.[13] Finally, the apostle Paul confirms these turning points in his letters to the Galatians and Romans. The message is: God is the God of all; not of some, but of all human beings, "that he might have mercy on all."[14] I would be interested in searching through the writings that Goethe left behind in 143 volumes plus to see if this interpretation has merit.     

VII.

I learned three important things from Tonsor today:

First, as a passionate reader of Goethe, who was his "mentor and model," Tonsor has carefully examined the internal evidence of the document as well as considered its external context. The most literal, commonsense reading of Faust leads one to see both naturalistic and transcendent elements -- the complete cosmos in all its complementarities and contradictions. Thus the play is about as anti-ideological as can be.

Second, perspective matters. It determines the assumptions that are brought to the primary sources as well as the questions that are put to them. If you see the play only through a naturalistic lens, your interpretation will be radically limited -- different from what you will see if you allow for both naturalism on Earth and transcendence in Heaven. The "both-and" approach is the integral humanists' way.

Third, Tonsor is the type of scholar who will not be corralled with the herd. In fact, in his stubborn independence he is a lot like Goethe. If you closely read the end of Faust Part I and Faust Part II, you cannot help but see its creator swimming against the current of modern thought. Goethe was a challenge to his age, a sign of contradiction. It was as Matthew Arnold said: He interpreted the increasingly materialistic modern age to itself, and did so by warning us not to forget the abiding spiritual drama of man's existence.

How bold! Such a thing could only have been crafted and pulled off by a genius. "Goethe was by far our greatest modern man ... the thinker who, more than any other, interpreted the modern world to itself."

Now I think I am beginning to believe it.

Dante's Purgatorio (Canto 27), by Gustave Dore

___________

Notes

[1] The sources for each of these statements are found in the earlier dialogue but for convenience are repeated here. For the observation that Tonsor read Goethe every day, see Caroline Tonsor conversation with GW, Chelsea, MI, July 7, 2017. On the comment that Goethe was Henry Regnery's and Stephen Tonsor's mentor and model, see Stephen J. Tonsor, "Henry Regnery," Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 322. For the paraphrase of Matthew Arnold, see Arnold, "A French Critic on Goethe," in Mixed Essays, quoted by Helen C. White, "Matthew Arnold and Goethe," PMLA, vol. 36, no. 3 (September 1921): 336, 338.

[2] Carolyn Heilbrun's distinction cited by Elizabeth Vandiver, "Foundations," Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd. ed. (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2004), p. 7.

[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative," Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 304.

[4] Goethe, Poetry and Truth, Part II, ch. 7; quoted by Jane K. Brown, Goethe's Faust: The German Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 29.

[5] Goethe quoted in Susan Sage Heinzelman, "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe," Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd. ed. (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2004), lecture 60, p. 392. 

[6] The term comes from the classic study that Tonsor assigned in the first semester of History 416: M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).

[7] Goethe's idol, Shakespeare, wrote tragedies that explore the ambiguity of the human condition. On Shakespeare's stage, life is not black and white but gray and grayer -- unending clashes of unreconciled values and opposing beliefs that introduce much misery into the human condition. See Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967).

[8] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book 1.

[9] Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford, conversation of December 16, 1829, in the Kindle ebook edition, loc. 6657.

[10] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Use and Abuse of Myth," Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 184.

[11] Isaiah 55:8; Romans 11:33-35.

[12] Isaiah 56:3-8.

[13] Matthew 15:21-28.

[14] Galatians 3:28; Romans 11:1-32.

Tonsor: Intellectual History: Goethe II

I. 

As I labored my way back to the bus stop near the Diag, a grocery bag of books in each arm, I reflected on Tonsor's habit of reading Goethe every morning and his sheer delight in discussing Faust. How had my professor kept such enthusiasm for the same work since the 1940s?[1] How could he wax eloquent about a Dead White European Male in the 1980s when to do so on a college campus was considered bad form? Stanford University's debates over "the core and the canon" had made international news.[2] Goethe was now suspect, as guilty as the next DWEM of racism, sexism, classism, and chauvinism. Some scholars even indicted Goethe for inspiring the Nazis. It is one of the terrible ironies of German history that the concentration camp at Buchenwald is but fifteen minutes from Goethe's Weimar.[3]

If you knew Stephen Tonsor, you could take it to the bank: He was not going to be cowed by the canon wars. Au contraire: He was the type who would go out of his way to laud DWEMs like Goethe if he thought it would get under the skin of leftist critics. 

It was risky behavior. A former student of Tonsor's whom I had met, Bob Houbeck, asked him why the Left had not taken him down. After all, Michigan was a leftist stronghold and Tonsor would have been low-hanging fruit. Tonsor told him, "The Left just never got around to targeting me. Maybe it's because of my guardian angel."[4] No wonder Tonsor believed in the transcendent in Faust.

II.

The historian in Tonsor sought out Goethe for the obvious reasons -- his preeminence in the republic of letters; his mastery of a half-dozen languages and a dozen literary genres; his status as the last great classical writer of Western civilization; his brilliance as a polymath; his scientific discoveries; his attractive personality and dazzling conversation, rather like Lord Acton's. 

The cultural critic in Tonsor appreciated Goethe for the critical reasons discussed earlier. The Weimar poet grasped as few others did the newly emerging psychological, philosophical, and theological problems presented by modernity. 

Henry Regnery (1912-1996)

The Germanophile in Tonsor loved Goethe for yet another reason, one whose motive was less apparent. If you listened to him over a period of time you figured it out: Tonsor felt the burden of modern German history, and Goethe was the rebuke to what had gone wrong in that history -- from Luther's cleavage of Western Christendom ... to the radical Germanic thought of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud ... to the nation's barbarous behavior in two world wars. In contrast to these evils and errors stood Goethe (and Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Humboldt and Mann, and, and, and --), who reminded the nation of the better angels of their nature and who thus represented the great humanistic storehouse of the German people. For all these reasons Goethe held the lamp that could guide Germans still. So Tonsor, who took such great pride in his German heritage, found much pleasure in spending time with Goethe. And he enjoyed sharing that pleasure with students, colleagues, and friends. Goethe, in fact, was one of the bonds that Tonsor and his Germanophilic friend, Henry Regnery, shared. Regnery, too, was eager to restore German culture to its pride of place in the world.[5] 

On a more personal note, Tonsor remarked that "Goethe has served as Henry Regnery's mentor and model. He has been very important in my formation, too."[6] 

III.

In a world that was reevaluating Dead White European Males, it was one thing to cultivate a private admiration for Goethe. It was another to make a public declaration of it. By the 1980s, the postmodern academy was not a particularly accommodating place for a historian and cultural critic like Stephen Tonsor. In his interior life he was a conservative, a Catholic, and an integral humanist. By temperament and education he swam against the postmodern current. Yet his discipline, modern European intellectual history, required him to teach the very radicals, progressives, and postmodern theorists who reviled his most cherished beliefs. To his credit, Tonsor could lecture on those radicals, progressives, and postmodern theorists with the best of them, and generations of students profited from his teaching. Nevertheless, at Michigan when I knew him, he was a stranger in a strange land -- a sojourner through a kingdom ruled not by his beloved Goethe but by that troika of dominating Germanic thinkers -- Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. 

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), explored
the distance between what we say
and what we mean.

What united these three titans of modern thought was their insistence on a radical, even a militant, reading of the great books. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur famously called such a reading the "hermeneutics of suspicion." Literary scholars would call it "critique."[7] Tonsor did not share the radicals' admiration for such a method. He must have asked himself, from the Sixties forward, why the New Left and each succeeding wave of scholars approached the best-loved books in an increasingly militant manner. He saw first-hand how intellectual history had undergone a paradigm shift called the "linguistic turn," which explored the degree to which philosophical problems were really linguistic problems. Richard Rorty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault -- all of them became quite modish by the 1980s and infused intellectual history with a sophistical jargon that Tonsor abhored. The young set of intellectual historians were not as ingenious as they thought they were; they were just channeling the ancient nihilists, Gorgias and Protagoras. It was all very wearisome to Tonsor. Must all truth-claims be treated with suspicion and hostility (unless, of course, they came from one's own ideological allies)? Could there not still be space in the academy for what St. John's College tutor Eva Brann called "the principle of charity" when reading and discussing important works?[8] 

The Oxford English professor, Helen Small, would argue years later that methodological balance was needed to restore the humanities: 

"the work of the humanities is frequently descriptive, or appreciative, or imaginative, or provocative, or speculative, more than it is critical."[9] 

Yes.

And the University of Virginia English professor, Rita Felski, would similarly challenge her colleagues: 

"Why is it that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage? What sustains their assurance that a text is withholding something of vital importance, that their task is to ferret out what lies concealed in its recesses and margins? Why is critique so frequently feted as the most serious and scrupulous form of thought? What intellectual and imaginative alternatives does it overshadow, obscure, or overrule? And what are the costs of such ubiquitous criticality?[10]

Yes ... yes! 

IV.

When I started graduate school at Michigan in '87, the very dangers that Tonsor had already stared down now reared up at me. If he had three strikes against him, I had three strikes against me before joining the program. By tacking conservative, by becoming a Catholic, and by approaching important books with a humanist's appreciation rather than a radical's suspicion, I too was a stranger in a strange land. I was asking questions that did not align with the postmodern agenda. In contrast to the training of previous generations -- think of Tonsor's in the years after World War II, which tended to be deferential toward the canon -- my generation was being trained "to read against the grain and between the lines" to expose the lies, bad faith, and self-delusions that riddled the canon. That in essence is what it means to practice the "hermeneutics of suspicion" or "critique."[11]

Nor was that all. At Michigan it was not just the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and "critique" that were taught. It was also the attitude, or pose, that accompanied radical methods. In the West's elite programs, Felski has observed, one finds the humanities' methodological gatekeepers "patrolling the boundaries of what counts as serious thought." They foster "the cultivation of an intellectual persona that is highly prized ... suspicious, knowing, self-conscious, hardheaded, tirelessly vigilant." A degree of "arrogance" and "nonchalance" earns one style points.[12]

I wanted to pursue graduate studies because I loved history. I wanted to understand the past. But I would soon be forced to make a decision. On the one hand, I might have to tolerate the distasteful parts of a graduate education to land a teaching job. On the other hand, to strike a postmodern pose was not for me -- it felt inauthentic. I was not looking to be radical or subversive but to discover the meaning of the past -- more in line with Ricoeur's "hermeneutics of faith" than the "hermeneutics of suspicion." This led me to ask questions that were different from those of the radical students and professors around me.[13]  

I kept these qualms to myself -- and the irony of such a position was not lost on me. Any presentations I gave, any papers I submitted, deserved to be treated with the very hermeneutics of suspicion I found so distasteful!

What a conundrum I had worked myself into. How did I get there?

V.

My first exposure to critique was at the University of Konstanz in 1984-'85, during my Fulbright year in then-West Germany; Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss were two leaders of reader-response criticism, making Konstanz a pilgrimage for postmodernists during the mid '80s. My next exposure came at a summer course at the University of Oxford in 1985, when I learned about the linguistic turn in intellectual history. Later still I was able to refine my knowledge of critique in an advanced English class at Colorado State University. Although I was intellectually curious about critique during these years, I never felt that it was the approach that I needed to adopt to do my work. Critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion did not get at the questions I was asking.

In addition to these courses, I noticed a disconnect between the English and history departments at CSU in the 1980s. The English classes that were taught by younger faculty were a world apart from the history classes that were taught by older faculty. These latter men -- for they all were male -- were old school. Thus my history classes at CSU tended not delve into the hermeneutics of suspicion. There was still joy to be had in reading thoughtful, engaging books of history without seeing them through critical theory. As a result, one of the younger English professors accused his older colleagues in the history department of running a "suburban book club." Cute, clever even, but not convincing. I approached graduate school with the mistaken notion that I could work toward a Ph.D. in European intellectual history -- in an elite department at an elite university -- without having to embrace the hermeneutics of suspicion.

Thomas Mark (1924-2010)

How mistaken I was. Through no fault of their own, the older generation of scholars whose classes I took taught me the way they had been taught, and I surmised that I could follow their path. 

One of my older professors at CSU was Tom Mark.[14] A Hungarian-American who had fought the Nazis in World War II, Professor Mark taught me Shakespeare. He was a character on campus and something of a gadfly. One evening when a famous postmodern literary critic visited the Fort Collins campus, Professor Mark showed up. The visitor was filled with self-importance. He impressed the audience with his display of critique, slashing and burning the literary canon. Most of the younger professors seemed attentive and appreciative. When the time came for Q&A, Professor Mark raised his right hand; he held a pipe in his left hand, close to his mouth. The visiting critic called on him, and Professor Mark asked, slowly, deliberately: 

"Why?" 

He drawled the word out and his New York accent hung in the room like the sword of Damocles. Then he went back to puffing his pipe.

"Why?" It was all Tom Mark said. I and a number of other people in the audience started to laugh, quietly at first, and then more conspicuously. The laughter amplified the absurdity of the nihilism expressed by our pompous guest.  

Later, when I got to know Stephen Tonsor, his contrary manner would sometimes remind me of the same in Tom Mark. These dedicated humanists were two of a kind. But they were a vanishing kind, and I did not know, when I arrived at Michigan in 1987, how close they were to extinction. 

____________________

Notes

[1] Caroline Tonsor conversation with GW, Chelsea, MI, July 7, 2017. She distinctly remembers her husband's well-worn copy of Goethe when they moved to the North Campus of the University of Michigan in 1955. She also conveyed to me that, prior to Ann Arbor, they enjoyed discussing Goethe's poetry when they were in the University of Illinois Poetry Club from 1946-'48, and when Stephen Tonsor studied in Zurich, Switzerland, from 1948-'49. Caroline Tonsor email to GW, July 5, 2017.

[2] For an overview of the conflict at Stanford University within the larger context of the culture wars, see Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), esp. pp. 227-30.

[3] See, e.g., Susan Sage Heinzelman, "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe," in Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2004), pp. 393, 395.

[4] Robert Houbeck conversation with GW, Flint, MI, June 15, 2015.

[5] Alfred Regnery conversation with GW, Washington, DC, May 17, 2017. For passages that abundantly demonstrate Henry Regnery's love of the best in high German culture -- relevant to this project because they reveal how Tonsor came to see Regnery as a fellow Germanophile -- see Henry Regnery, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher (Chicago: Regnery Books, 1985).

[6] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Henry Regnery," Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 322.

[7] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (1970), quoted by Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), Introduction.

[8] "The principle of charity" is from a quotation by Eva Brann at URL http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/08/attitude-reader-book-eva-brann.html. 

[9] Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 26; quoted by Felski, Critique, Introduction.

[10] Felski, Critique, Introduction.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (1970); and Felski, Critique, Introduction.

[14] For more on Tom Mark, see URL http://english.colostate.edu/2014/04/announcing-the-dr-thomas-r-mark-assistive-technology-room/.