SAMUEL BECKETT, WILHELM WINDELBAND AND... 89 Samuel Beckett, Wilhelm Windelband and... nominalist philosophy Matthew Feldman (University of Northampton, UK1) Wilhelm Windelband has been only recently recognised for his critical importance to Beckett’s artistic development and philosophical knowledge. However, unlike most of the philosophers contained in this collection, the neo-Kantian’s A History of Philosophy was specifically consulted by Beckett as a secondary source, one recounting the system of Western philosophy as an “integrated whole”. What is more, the revised 1901 A History of Philosophy may be one of the handful of texts most important to Beckett, rivalling even Dante’s Inferno and The Bible in terms of lifelong influence. To establish this empirical argument, the focus taken here will be directed upon the roughly 400 sides, recto and verso, of Beckett’s 267-folio “Philosophy Notes” that are taken from Windelband’s introductory text. While Beckett’s reading in Western philosophy before the second century A.D. is comprised from multiple sources evident in the “Philosophy Notes”, the final 1600 years of Western philosophy to Friedrich Nietzsche are mediated 1 I am grateful to the Bergen Research Foundation and the University of Bergen, Norway, for a Senior Research Fellowship with the 'Modernism and Christianity' project facilitating the completion of this text. I also gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” from Mr Edward Beckett, the Estate of Samuel Beckett, and the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, UK. Portions of this text were first presented at the June 2011 “Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive” conference at the University of York; I am grateful to the conference organisers, Peter Fifield, Bryan Radley and Lawrence Rainey, for inviting me to organise the “Beckett and Philosophy” panel there, and for the helpful feedback received from delegates on my discussion of Windelband and nominalism. Finally, I would also like to extend my thanks to Erik Tonning, James Knowlson, John Pilling, and David Addyman for discussing, reading and commenting upon the ideas presented here; however, any mistakes are my own. 90 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW entirely through A History of Philosophy. This large, concluding portion of the “Philosophy Notes” is here considered via the employment of Windelband’s reading of nominalism, in addition to his more general account of Western philosophy; one impacting upon Beckett as early as 1932, but lasting to the 1969 Nobel Prize and beyond. §1 I know of no work that presents so clearly in their succession the main problems of past thought, or brings out so connectedly and concentratedly the preparation that was made by the ancient phi- losophy for the introduction of Christianity, or that exhibits more justly the relations between it an the Christian thought of the first Christian centuries. It is gratifying to follow a writer so thor- oughly imbued with the principles of his own science, and so controlled by them, and who recognizes […] the progress of phi- losophy, and who does not claim for the latter more than its just due in the shaping of ecclesiastical dogmas. The book deserves the attention of all who would learn how thought has come to be what it is, and who would themselves “learn to think”. – 1893 review of A History of Philosophy2 Professor Wilhelm Windelband’s 681-page overview of Western philoso- phy, breathlessly endorsed in the contemporaneous review excerpted above, was not only useful to readers “who would themselves ‘learn to think.”’ In the case of Samuel Beckett, famously and on the contrary, his interest was nearly the op- posite. Rather than knowledge, what he increasingly viewed as “the loutishness of learning” – already decried in his 1934 poem, “Gnome” – is more likely to have motivated Beckett’s extensive note-taking from A History of Philosophy in the early 1930s.3 In the same spirit, he informed Anne Atik some four decades 2 Egbert C. Smyth, “Brief Notice of Important Books,” in The Andover Review: A Religious and Theological Monthly 114, (Nov./Dec. 1893), 776. 3 Samuel Beckett, “Gnome,” in Selected Poems: 1930-1989, edited by David Wheatley (London, Faber: 2009), 9. SAMUEL BECKETT, WILHELM WINDELBAND AND... 91 later, “you have to get back to ignorance”; put another way, even at the outset of his literary career, Beckett sought to “unlearn to think.”4 Given the genocidal disasters brought about by twentieth-century thinking, to which he was an en- gaged and traumatized witness, Beckett’s reminders of human ignorance are re- freshingly heretical. However, it remains the case that both “learn[ing] to think” and “unlearning to think” necessitated a prior knowledge of Western thought. That is to say, for systematic thinking to be turned on its head in characteristi- cally Beckettian fashion, knowledge of systematic thought – in this case, of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Friedrich Nietzsche – was an es- sential precursor. Whether for “learned ignorance” or in pursuit of “the progress of phi- losophy,” it is clear above all that Beckett’s engagement with, and employ- ment of, Wilhelm Windelband was both extensive and profound. This is so much so, I want to suggest here, that the latter ought to be included in that “canon” of philosophers exerting the greatest influence upon Beckett’s crucial development in the years before his postwar breakthrough. When Beckett first encountered Windelband in (likely) mid-to-late 1932, perhaps nowhere else were the “evolution of the ideas of European philosophy” in terms of “the history of problems and conceptions [.…] as a connected and interrelated whole” more succinctly and accessibly presented than in A History of Philosophy.5 Furthermore, many of those frequently recognized as “Becket- tian” philosophers – Arnold Geulincx, Bishop Berkeley, Gottfried Leibniz and several others – were first encountered in the revised, second edition of A History of Philosophy from 1901. Before going on to explore some of phi- losophical debts to this text, however, a moment’s pause over the context and corpus of Beckett’s note-taking during this period is in order. During his years of self-education across the 1930s, Beckett took notes on a striking range of subjects. As James Knowlson’s imperative biography makes plain, this was a period of dejection, directionless travel, and uncer- tainty. On one hand, the death of Beckett’s father in June 1933 led him to two years of thrice-weekly analysis with the trainee psychotherapist Wilfred 4 Cited in Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (London, Faber and Fa- ber: 2001), 121. 5 Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 2 vols., trans. James H. Tufts (New York, Harper Torchbooks: 1958), ix-x. 92 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Bion between Christmastime 1933 and Christmastime 1935; but there were also panic attacks, psychosomatic illnesses, and a growing desire to leave the constraints of Ireland for the continent – or indeed anywhere, as sug- gested by letters to the Soviet filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, or applications for a lectureship in South Africa at this time.6 Adding to Beckett’s frustra- tions, furthermore, was a lack of critical success for his fiction, ranging from the failure to publish his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women to literally dozens of rejection letters from publishers prior to Routledge’s pub- lication of Murphy in 1938.7 Comparatively more successful at this time were Beckett’s poems (notably the 1935 collection Echo’s Bones) and free- lance criticism (collected in the 1984 Disjecta), but this provided neither enough income to live on, nor enough plaudits to convince him that he was, at that time, what he was to become after 1945: a groundbreaking artist; a literary genius; and for some, the very conscience of the last century – or, to use a phrase from the 1969 Nobel Presentation Speech, “a miserere from all mankind, its muffled minor key sounding liberation to the oppressed, and comfort to those in need.”8 Long before that infamous pessimism and stoicism earned Beckett the Nobel Prize for Literature, then, were the far less celebrated, but no less im- portant, “years of wandering” also announced in the quatrain “Gnome.” As a number of critics in Beckett Studies have established over the last genera- tion, this period of intellectual gestation was vital for the breakthrough achieved in the “frenzy of writing” between 1945 and 1950 – a period pro- ducing Waiting for Godot and “The Trilogy” of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), amongst others. Considering that his 1996 au- thorized biography, Damned to Fame, largely sparked this empirical turn toward Beckett’s formative years, it is hard to disagree with the conclusion 6 See The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. I: 1929-1940, edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn (Cambridge, Cambridge Univer- sity Press: 2009), 317, 523-28. 7 For insightful accounts of both of these publishing fiascos, see Mark Nixon ed., Samuel Beckett and Publishing (London, The British Library: 2011), especially chap- ters 1 and 3. 8 “Nobelprize.org,” available at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/ 1969/press.html (last accessed 20/5/11). SAMUEL BECKETT, WILHELM WINDELBAND AND... 93 regarding Beckett’s postwar creative burst offered there: “the ground was well prepared.”9 Nowhere are his provisions for an unsettled present and unknown future – captured by Beckett’s reflexive