In each case, personification, prosopopoeia, plays the role of aphorism and oracle. Each states the case for the abuse of use.
Nietzsche thinks too much consciousness of history prevents action and engagement in the world. Alberti thinks too much engagement inthe world prevents reading and writing. Neither is hostile to fame, but both are keenly aware of the dangers of seeking it.
Marx sees that the commodity articulates false consciousness, erasing or occluding human labor. But there are commonalities in their approaches. Here is Nietzsche on what’s wrong with scholarship:
Believe me: when human beings are forced to work in the factory of scholarship and become useful before they are mature, then in a short time scholarship itself is just as ruined as the slaves who are exploited in this factory from an early age. I regret that it is already necessary to make use of the jargon of slave owners and employers in order to describe such conditions, which in principle should be conceived free of utility and free from the necessities of life.
… just look at the scholars, the exhausted hens … they can only cackle more than ever because they are laying eggs more frequently. To be sure, the eggs have kept getting smaller (although the books have only gotten bigger). The final and natural consequence of this is that universally favored “popularization” (along with “feminization” and “infantization”) of scholarship; that is, the infamous tailoring of the cloak of scholarship to the body of the “mixed public” … Goethe saw in this an abuse, and he demanded that scholarship have an impact on the outside world only by means of an
enhanced praxis.
27
What is the praxis of literature? Is it creative writing, the production of poems, plays, novels, and fictions, or does its praxis extend to literary criticism—and if so, who are the intended readers? Nietzsche’s scornful reference to the “mixed public” and to “popularization” foreshadows today’s focus on “the public humanities” and on accessibility, from book clubs to PBS specials. Nietzsche divides history into three kinds: monumental history (the study of great men and great works, which “deceives by analogies” 28 ), antiquarian history (the study of facts and “the habitual, which foster[s] the past”), and critical history (the study of oppression, which “judges and condemns” 29 ). We might draw an analogy, however inexact, with three contemporary approaches to literary study: canonicity, historicism, and cultural—or ethical—theory. Each of these raises problems for, and challenges to, the notion of the literary.
Above all, Nietzsche’s essay concludes, the problem with “culture” or “cultivation” is that it can too easily be seen as a mere “decoration of life,” rather than—as in his own vision—“a unanimity of life, thought, appearance, and will.” 30 This issue will come up again and again for us vis-à-vis the use of literature for life. Is it essential, intrinsic, internal, and formative (for thinking, for action, for character, for approaching the future as well as the past), or is it ancillary, decorative, an embellishment, a social accomplishment, an extra? Requirement or elective? Body or clothing? Sustenance or delicacy?
The Use and Abuse of Reading
There could hardly be a greater contrast between the bitter and eloquent passion of a young man like Alberti (who used the phrase
young man
constantly in
The Use and Abuse of Books
, especially in the passages where the books were speaking and offering advice to him) and the blithe and urbane tone of Sir Norman Birkett’s lecture to the National Book League, “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” in 1951, some five hundred years later. Birkett, who succeeded poet John Masefield as the league’s president, was a celebrated jurist—a defense lawyer of note who had been a British judge at the Nuremberg war trials and later became a lord justice of
Nietzsche thinks too much consciousness of history prevents action and engagement in the world. Alberti thinks too much engagement inthe world prevents reading and writing. Neither is hostile to fame, but both are keenly aware of the dangers of seeking it.
Marx sees that the commodity articulates false consciousness, erasing or occluding human labor. But there are commonalities in their approaches. Here is Nietzsche on what’s wrong with scholarship:
Believe me: when human beings are forced to work in the factory of scholarship and become useful before they are mature, then in a short time scholarship itself is just as ruined as the slaves who are exploited in this factory from an early age. I regret that it is already necessary to make use of the jargon of slave owners and employers in order to describe such conditions, which in principle should be conceived free of utility and free from the necessities of life.
… just look at the scholars, the exhausted hens … they can only cackle more than ever because they are laying eggs more frequently. To be sure, the eggs have kept getting smaller (although the books have only gotten bigger). The final and natural consequence of this is that universally favored “popularization” (along with “feminization” and “infantization”) of scholarship; that is, the infamous tailoring of the cloak of scholarship to the body of the “mixed public” … Goethe saw in this an abuse, and he demanded that scholarship have an impact on the outside world only by means of an
enhanced praxis.
27
What is the praxis of literature? Is it creative writing, the production of poems, plays, novels, and fictions, or does its praxis extend to literary criticism—and if so, who are the intended readers? Nietzsche’s scornful reference to the “mixed public” and to “popularization” foreshadows today’s focus on “the public humanities” and on accessibility, from book clubs to PBS specials. Nietzsche divides history into three kinds: monumental history (the study of great men and great works, which “deceives by analogies” 28 ), antiquarian history (the study of facts and “the habitual, which foster[s] the past”), and critical history (the study of oppression, which “judges and condemns” 29 ). We might draw an analogy, however inexact, with three contemporary approaches to literary study: canonicity, historicism, and cultural—or ethical—theory. Each of these raises problems for, and challenges to, the notion of the literary.
Above all, Nietzsche’s essay concludes, the problem with “culture” or “cultivation” is that it can too easily be seen as a mere “decoration of life,” rather than—as in his own vision—“a unanimity of life, thought, appearance, and will.” 30 This issue will come up again and again for us vis-à-vis the use of literature for life. Is it essential, intrinsic, internal, and formative (for thinking, for action, for character, for approaching the future as well as the past), or is it ancillary, decorative, an embellishment, a social accomplishment, an extra? Requirement or elective? Body or clothing? Sustenance or delicacy?
The Use and Abuse of Reading
There could hardly be a greater contrast between the bitter and eloquent passion of a young man like Alberti (who used the phrase
young man
constantly in
The Use and Abuse of Books
, especially in the passages where the books were speaking and offering advice to him) and the blithe and urbane tone of Sir Norman Birkett’s lecture to the National Book League, “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” in 1951, some five hundred years later. Birkett, who succeeded poet John Masefield as the league’s president, was a celebrated jurist—a defense lawyer of note who had been a British judge at the Nuremberg war trials and later became a lord justice of
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