Through a Glass, Darkly: Blurred Images of Cultural Tradition and Modernity over Distance and Time (International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology)

115 Pages·1999·6.61 MB·English

by  Wilhelmus Antonius Arts

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
IN
SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Editor
S. ISHWARAN
VOLUME LXXV
WIL ARTS (ED.)
THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
THROUGH A GLASS,
DARKLY
Blurred images of cultural tradition
and modernity over distance and time
EDITED BY
WIL ARTS
BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON • KOLN
2000
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Through a Glass, Darkly : blurred images of cultural tradition and moder-
nity over distance and time / ed. by Wil Arts - Leiden ; Boston ; Koln :
Brill, 2000.
(International studies in sociology and social anthropology ; Vol. 75)
ISBN 90-04-11597-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is also available
ISSN 0074-8684
ISBN 90 04 11597 8
© Copyright 2000 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
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PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
CONTENTS
WIL ARTS, Through a Glass, Darkly: An Introductory Essay 1
WOLF LEPENIES, Beyond Melancholy and Before Utopia: A Plea for
a Boring World 12
JACK GOODY, Experience and Expectations of the East 30
NILUFER GOLE, Global Expectations, Local Experiences: Non-
Western Modernities 40
HANS BELTING, The Visual Arts Today: Experiences and Expecta-
tions 56
HARRY PEETERS, Old Virtues and Vices as Icons of a New Morality 67
WlLLEM WITTEVEEN, Pursuing the Spirit of the Laws: An Epilogue 79
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 92
AUTHOR INDEX 94
SUBJECT INDEX 96
Acknowledgment
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from
the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation and Tilburg University
Through a Glass, Darkly
An introductory essay
WIL ARTS
Introduction
Erasmus's first visit to England, which lasted from the early summer
of 1499 till the beginning of 1500, marked for him a period of drastic
change. He came as a learned poet. He left with a need to dedicate himself
to more serious matters. The cause of this turn was, according to Johan
Huizinga's famous biography of Erasmus, that he found in England two
new friends, John Colet and Thomas More, who as personalities were far
superior to those who had crossed his path till then. Another biographer
of Erasmus, Cornelis Augustijn, describes vividly how deeply impressed
Erasmus was by the lectures Colet delivered in Oxford in 1499 on the epistles
of St. Paul.
While returning from his second visit to England in the summer of 1514
Erasmus wrote a letter to the Prior of the Monastery of Steyn who had called
him back to the cloistered life that he had abandoned twenty years before.
The core of his letter is a reasoned and staunch refusal to be recalled. For
the sake of argument he refers to the important lessons he learned from John
Colet and defends how he put those lessons into practice, i.e. his way of
living. He lists the works he wrote in the mean time and elaborates on his
plans especially with regard to the epistles of St. Paul. That he turned his
attention to more serious things did not mean, however, that Erasmus the
poet had gone for ever. In 1509, while he crossed the Alps on the way from
Italy for his second visit to England, the conception of his now world famous
The Praise of Folly came to him. He wrote it quickly in London, at the house
of Sir Thomas More, to whom it is dedicated. The book is spoken by Folly in
her own person. She makes fun of all kinds of things, such as national pride
and professional conceit. There are passages, however, where the satire gives
way to invective, and Folly utters the serious opinions of Erasmus. Even in
some of those passages we find references to the letters of St. Paul, especially
those to the Corinthians: Erasmus's inevitable and revered St. Paul, one could
call him! For above all he wanted to follow St. Paul's lead by reconciling two
cultures, Christendom and Greek philosophy. 'Saint Socrates, pray for us'; so
WIL ARTS
wrote Erasmus at the end of his Religious Symposium, comparing the pagan
Greek philosopher to St. Paul.
[2]
Conference
Erasmus dispatched the last letter known to us from Basle, where he
had lived at the end of his life, on the 28th of June 1536. In this letter he
wrote aegra manu, i.e. with a sick hand, 'Oh, if Brabant was only somewhat
nearer...'. In the Dutch province of North-Brabant at Tilburg University a
conference was held on the 26th of November 1998 under the title of Through
a Glass, Darkly. It was part of a whole range of festivities on the occasion
of the fortieth anniversary of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation. The
Board of the Foundation brought the festivities under one denominator,
that of the Festival of Contrasts. The common theme was the interplay
between experiences and expectations in modern arts and sciences. The
question addressed at the Tilburg conference went as follows: Do the images
Western scholars and artists derive from their experiences with modernity
and tradition in East and West, in Past and Present contrast with the images
concerning the future they draw from their expectations?
In view of Erasmus's special affinity with the epistles of St. Paul it seems
appropriate that the conference took as its motto part of a famous passage
from St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. 'For now we see through a
glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I
know even as also I am known'. St. Paul makes this remark as a sequel
to an earlier observation 'For we know in part, and we prophesy in part'.
Without any sacrilegious intent these citations were used by the organizers
of the conference to emphasize that in today's European arts and sciences
most of the time we see not only other, but also our own cultural traditions
and the different forms of modernity like a dim image in a mirror. And
the future of our own and other cultures seems to be shrouded in mystery,
because our gift of knowledge and inspired messages are only partial. We
seem to have a propensity to look at cultural forms of tradition and modernity
over distance and time as through a glass, darkly. Is it possible to get an
almost face-to-face intimacy with various forms of cultural tradition and
modernity by using our experiences and our powers of imagination, i.e. our
expectations, in a more fruitful way? That was the question to be addressed
at the conference. This book contains the proceedings of this conference
in which preliminary answers were given to this weighty question. The
contributors to the conference tried to give these answers by taking as a
guideline Erasmus's famous motto ad fontes, i.e. always go to the sources.
INTRODUCTION
Without, however, nursing the illusion that our partial knowledge will ever
be complete.
[3]
Problem definition
The central question of the conference, and therefore of this book, was as
mentioned above the following: How do our experiences of cultural tradition
and modernity in East and West, in Past and Present, contrast with our
expectations of cultural changes in the time to come? This question raised
new questions. For example: How can we derive a vision of what is bound to
happen or what we want to happen by applying our experiences of the past
and our expectations of the future? How do our experiences of culture and
society in East and West, in Past and Present, contrast with our expectations
of cultural and societal changes that will direct us possibly or probably,
hopefully or regrettably to the global society of the future? From the vantage
point of the social and behavioral sciences, these questions place us on the
horns of a dilemma.
We as human beings, regardless of whether we are living in either
East or West, take part in a culture that has both traditional and modern
characteristics. In coping with the challenges of tradition and modernity
we are directed by our mind and its brain, which are complex information-
processing systems that function to identify problems and offer solutions to
them. Because human perception and action take place through time from
the past to the future, we necessarily live in a world full of contradictions
and paradoxes. Why is that so? Because in order to solve our problems we
have to nurse the expectation that our future will be different from the past.
If we want to use our experiences to solve our problems, however, we need
the future to be like the past. The past can be known by having recourse
to our experiences but cannot be influenced by us, whereas the future can
be influenced by us but not known by having recourse to our experiences.
We can only make guesses about possibilities and probabilities and entertain
hopes or be afraid of what the future will bring. In solving our problems by
using our mind and its brain we therefore have to be directed by both the
visible hand of the past and the invisible hand of the future. And we have to
realize that there is an almost unsolvable tension between those two hands,
or at least a tension that is very difficult to neutralize.
Let me give an example that elucidates this rather abstract line of
reasoning and which is quite appropriate to the subject of this book. Our
experiences of cultural changes in past and present give credence to our belief
that modernization and globalization processes will go on accelerating at
least for a while. At the same time, however, we expect that the acceleration