WOLF LEPENIES

One of my luckiest breaks was the year I spent a year in Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 1993-94; after the petty intrigues in the finance ministry, it was such a relief and fun to meet intellectuals. Foremost amongst them was Wolf Lepenies, who was Rektor of the Kolleg; apart from that, he was also a formidable intellectual. This is what I learnt from his book, Aufstieg und Fall der Intellektuellen in Europa. This column was published in Business Standard of 11 September 2001.

SOME BEFUDDLED LECTURE NOTES

Wolf Lepenies is a remarkable intellectual: he is intelligible, and he can make a witty speech in English as well as French, apart from his native German. That is precocious enough; but I discovered that some time ago he gave a series of lectures in Italian. That was news to me, for I did not know he knew Italian. I suspect he had the lectures translated, and then faked the accent. I used to do that once in Spanish. Then, one day, I meant to boast about my success (exito), and instead did so about my rabbit (ejito). Since then I have become more cautious – and more respectful of Lepenies’s ventriloquic skills. This is what I understood him to be meaning to say.

He quoted prefaces by Kant as well as Bacon, which began with the words, “De nobis ipsis silemus” – on ourselves we will be silent – and promptly proceeded to break the injunction by talking about the intellectual. He defined the intellectual’s mission to be reflection, and his constant peril to be self-reflection. Then he yielded to the temptation.

René Descartes wrote in 1657, “Cogito ergo sum” – I think, therefore I am. Paul Valery changed it in 1925 to “This species always complains; hence it exists.” The intellectual suffers at the state of the world; and he cannot change it. So he becomes a melancholic. Lepenies wrote a book about that thirty years ago – the first book on the subject to my knowledge since Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy written three centuries ago.

Reflection is admissible in the Indian civilization. But Europe underwent the Protestant revolution in the sixteenth century; after that, a life of action came to be in fashion. The European intellectual could only reflect; that did not look like action. So he began to feel even sadder – and relieved his melancholia by thinking of a better world. Hence arose the tie between the intellectual and utopia. That is why millenarian states like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia forbade melancholy – and regarded intellectuals as traitors.

The melancholic intellectuals took refuge in the contemplation of nature. But nature meant something different in 18^th-century France. Those intellectuals were not Jains; they did not regard all life with equal respect. They were Christians, and according to Christian belief, they were all descendants of God. In a fit of displeasure, God threw Adam out of paradise, on to Adam’s Peak in Ceylon, and created Eve out of his loin to give him company. Soon they bred; the entire human race was descended from them. Animals were not; they were –lesser breeds. God created and destroyed life; but between those termini, he had given man the privilege of dealing as he liked with other beings. Untouched by man’s hand, they constituted wild, untamed nature; it was his job to tame them and make them beautiful. With man’s enlightened guidance, nature was supposed to look like the beautiful parks around the French chateaux. If man killed animals, it was to maintain balance in nature. Lepenies calls this physicotheology.

Nature was timeless, undifferentiated wilderness; man’s mission was to conquer it and organize it. Hence came about the amoralization of science: a scientist could do anything as long as he confined himself to facts and forecasts. Such scientists, in Lepenies’s words, were “men of good conscience”. That distinguished them from artists and writers, who swayed between melancholy and utopia – those whom Lepenies calls the “whining classes.”

The first break in this anthropocentric view of the world came with Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which he put forward the likelihood that man could change the world irreversibly if he continued to multiply naturally – and that but for his ability to discipline his fecundity, man would be no different from other animals. Malthus was soon followed by Lamarck the zoologist, who said that the only characteristic that distinguished man from animals was his social organization. Finally, in the 1850s, Darwin said it, “Man is no exception.” All knowledge, natural or social, came to be seen as amoral; social sciences began to look for an amoral paradigm. Thus instead of concerning itself with good and bad human actions, economics began to analyze advantageous and disadvantageous acts; instead of talking about good and bad primitives, anthropology strove to place all societies on a ladder of development.

That was a century and a half ago; since then, the world has changed irreversibly in many ways. Intellectual achievements have contributed much to those changes. And as a result of those changes, suddenly, the future looks uncertain.

The different forms of intellectual discourse are getting mixed up. Lepenies first noticed this about sociology; it seemed not to be able to decide whether it was science or literature. So he suggested that there were three cultures – the scientific, the artistic and the sociological. But this confusion threatens to become endemic: scientists now write like philosophers, anthropologists like novelists, economists like journalists; all boundaries are crumbling. The market is driving all intellectual disciplines into a cauldron of undifferentiated readability. It is as if intellectuals have begun to play with Lego, making different structures with the same pieces. Lepenies recalls a fantasy of Claude Lévi-Strauss: every city in the world would have a cinema, which would show the same 50 films covering all possible plots. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message.

Take art – a form that is pure medium. Hegel, in the early 19^th century, thought the function of art was to express the deepest spiritual truth, to intensify reality. That is what Hellenic art did according to him. Then art had reached its peak; by his time it was long past it. All that was left was to analyze art – to turn it into aesthetics. But he could not have anticipated what was to follow him a century later. In the early years of the 20^th century, representation itself went out of art. Thus in the 1960s, Kenneth Clark could admire the delicate little drawings of Sophie, who reminded him of early Paul Klee. She was a gorilla. Animals can often draw better than humans; but only humans draw real objects. For someone who turns to art for intensity of feeling, art might as well be dead.

But we have not only art without object; we have music without tonality, and novels without a hero. Bell declared The End of Ideology in 1960; in 1992 Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History. What does that mean? That there are no new ideologies to come, no new plots in history; we are only ringing the changes.

Is that so bad? In answer, Lepenies quoted Chevalier de Montbarey who, when he was asked why he spent his life in a boring provincial town (instead of Paris), said, “Well, good company here is like anywhere else, but bad company is absolutely excellent.”

At least, that is what I think Lepenies said. If you do not believe me, read his Aufstieg und Fall der Intellektuellen in Europa. That does not sound like Italian, though.