Can History Be Rational?
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CHAPTER 19 Can History be Rational? Stefan Bauer ‘Parchments signed and sealed / Are ghosts that haunt and daunt us.’ This is what Faust says when he signs his pact with the devil (Faust, Part I, vv. 1726– 1727).1 Papers which contain written text (so-called sources) are treated with great reverence by the historian—but can they really provide a rational look on the past? I would like to pose this question: is the past rationally control- lable? Put into other words: is the presumption of being able to dominate the past in itself not rather irrational? The figure of Faust of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe catches the ambiguity of the rational for the modern scientist.2 Written between the end of the eigh- teenth and the first third of the nineteenth century, Goethe’s play narrates a German legend of the sixteenth century. It expresses a new will to knowledge which arose at the end of the Middle Ages: ‘speculating about nature’. Scholars such as Ficino, Paracelsus, Bruno and Kepler sought universal wisdom and conducted research, among other things, on the harmony of the spheres, the chemical elements, and geometry. In their search for universal secret harmony and their attempt to grasp the order of Everything (with a capital E), they not seldom touched the limits of magic.3 Aby Warburg characterized the sixteenth century accordingly: ‘This was the age of Faust, in which the modern scientist— caught between magic practice and cosmic mathematics—was trying to insert the conceptual space of rationality between himself and the object. Athens has 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford, 1987), 52–53; Goethe, Faust, erster Teil, in idem, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, III, ed. Erich Trunz, 16th ed. (Munich, 1996; reprinted as ‘Sonderausgabe’, 1998), 57: ‘ein Pergament, beschrieben und beprägt, / Ist ein Gespenst, vor dem sich alle scheuen.’ 2 For what follows see Erich Trunz, ‘Nachwort’, in Goethe, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, 3:470– 504; Alexander Demandt, Philosophie der Geschichte: von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne, 2011), 188–209. 3 See also the observation by Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sci- ences humaines (Paris, 1966), 47: ‘Il nous semble que les connaissances du XVIe siècle étaient constituées d’un mélange instable de savoir rationnel, de notions dérivées des pratiques de la magie, et de tout un héritage culturel dont la redécouverte des textes anciens avait multiplié les pouvoirs d’autorité.’ See also William Caferro, Contesting the Renaissance (Malden, MA, 2010), 185. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/97890043553�3_0�0 Can History be Rational? 425 constantly to be won back again from Alexandria.’4 The idea of the ‘light of na- ture’, current in the sixteenth century, was then taken up again by the scientists of the eighteenth century.5 The legend of Faust also expresses itself in a play written by an English dra- matist, Christopher Marlowe, published in 1604. His figure of Faust is already the learned man thirsty for knowledge whom we find again in the dramatic poem of Goethe. Goethe concentrates largely on the individual understood as a figure who searches, revealing, thus, the essence of the modern man who attempts to dominate nature and aspires to supreme knowledge. Goethe knew the fields of natural sciences and of antiquity well, but he was also an acute observer of the society and politics of his time—vantage points which allowed him to present the dialogues between Mephistopheles, Doctor Faust, and his assistant Wagner with a dimension that today we would call interdisciplinary. As is well known, Faust had read philosophy, law, medicine, ‘and I fear / Theology too, from A to Z’, but he felt nonetheless ‘a poor silly man, / No wiser now than when I began’ (vv. 354–359). In the night scene set in his study with his assistant, he exclaims ‘I see all our search for knowledge is vain’ (v. 364).6 He 4 Aby Warburg, ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther’, in idem, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, CA, 1999), 597–697, at 650. For the original German version see idem, Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten (Heidelberg, 1920), 70: ‘Wir sind im Zeitalter des Faust, wo sich der moderne Wissenschaftler—zwischen magischer Praktik und kosmologischer Mathematik—den Denkraum der Besonnenheit zwischen sich und dem Objekt zu erringen versuchte. Athen will eben immer wieder neu aus Alexandrien zurückerobert sein.’ Warburg also took the motto for his article (see ibid., 4) from Goethe’s Faust: ‘Es ist ein altes Buch zu blättern: / Vom Harz bis Hellas immer Vettern!’ (‘How old a book I’m browsing in! / German or Greek, they’re kith and kin.’) See Goethe, Faust, zweiter Teil, vv. 7742–7743, in idem, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, 3:235; Faust, Part Two, trans. David Luke (Oxford, 1994), 100. 5 For the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries see The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler and Jill Kraye (Cambridge, 1988), where rationality is explored from many different angles. 6 Goethe, Faust, Part One, 15: ‘Well, that’s Philosophy I’ve read, / And Law and Medicine, and I fear Theology too, from A to Z; / Hard studies all, that have cost me dear. / And so I sit, poor silly man, / No wiser now than when I began. / … And I see all our search for knowledge is in vain!’. (vv. 354–59 364); Goethe, Faust, erster Teil, 20: ‘Habe nun, ach! Philosophie, / Juristerei und Medizin, / Und leider auch Theologie / Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn. / Da steh’ ich nun, ich armer Tor, / Und bin so klug als wie zuvor!… Und sehe, daß wir nichts wis- sen können!’.