Posted By BillHeise on June 16, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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As I said before in this blog, I started out my dissertation thinking that I could write a short paper explaining the logic of Raison’s “demonstration of indemonstrables.” But over time I kept growing my paper. When I went to the University of Illinois, I simply wanted to rework Fansler’s Chaucer and the Romance of the Rose, which was the oldest work (published in 1912, if I recall) on a major source of the most famous medieval poet that had not been revised. I thought that I could revise Fansler’s treatment of the Rose by pointing out how much logic there was in the poem.

However, I found myself confronting the modern worldview. And every time I confronted the modern worldview, I had to expand my knowledge of the context for allegory. I started out worrying about medieval allegory as distinct from modern allegory. But eventually I had to confront Goethe’s definition of allegory and symbol. It turned out that Goethe was interested in logic.

Goethe was extremely useful, because he gave me something that I could deconstruct. Symbol had been on top; allegory have been on the bottom for far too long. What I thought I could do in my dissertation was to reverse those poles. And this is what I did when I wrote my dissertation, which was entitled Aristotle and the Allegorical Aesthetic: The Limits of Philosophy from Alan of Lille to Edmund Spenser. (Yeah, I know. How cool am I?). I reversed symbol, which was failing, for allegory, which had been neglected.

It is important to note that I did not confront the Modern worldview all at once. I was walking through my dissertation as a blind man walks: feeling my way through the dark. I did not mind this, but I was frustrated that people who knew less than me were so sure that I was wrong that they would not listen to me try to explain myself. And, to be honest, I could not always explain myself adequately.

I have now completed my journey, and I’m writing about this from the point of view of my position of success. But when I was in graduate school, I was not completely in control, as (I think) I am as I write this blog. The difference between myself and the beginning of a journey and at the end of the journey is enormous. The difference between myself halfway through my journey and myself at the end of the journey is enormous. This is why I periodically go back into something I call “consolidation mode,” in which I go back and review the course my life has taken. I now feel that my dissertation was right in its view that logic was the driving force behind allegory from the 12th to the 16th century. However, I do not feel I had made the case for allegory being the product of logic in the Middle Ages. I had imported a Modern idea into the medieval field. After digging a little farther, I had settled on Kant’s Critique of Judgment as the basis of the modern point of view.

I actually had read Kant’s Critique of Judgment while I was still in graduate school. One of the things I realized in reading it was that logic had been the principle of exclusion in the divide between symbol and allegory. The principle of allegory relies on logic, according to Kant. The problem, as Kant saw it was that logic is limited. He decided that he needed a system of judgments to overcome the limits of logic. And he presented that system in his Critique of Judgment.

In that work, he gives us a system for judging an object. At the top of the system was what Kant calls the aesthetic judgment. In my dissertation, I had noted that the aesthetic judgment could be correlated to symbol, while the lower judgment was correlated to the less than useful universal judgment, which stopped before it reached the perception of the whole object.

This was my way into logic in the Middle Ages. Allegory was not correlated to the metaphysical principle appropriate to symbol, but was correlated instead to the limits of logic. I imported that definition into the Middle Ages, and I attempted to rewrite the history of allegory accordingly.

However, this approach did not correlate the modern worldview with the medieval worldview. It simply decided that the medieval worldview was inadequate to explain its own inner workings, that we needed the superior and self-conscious modern worldview to supplement the unconscious longing of the Middle Ages.

I got away with this largely because my advisers knew less about logic than I did–we were in an English department, mind you. I was making progress with my idea. I was working with thinkers like Herder and Hamann and poets like Alexander Pope. My advisors were experts in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They knew about Herder and Pope, but they did not know as much as I did. And I did not know enough to close my argument.

I was trying to deconstruct the opposition between allegory and symbol. This had its precedent. Jauss had written that the allegory-symbol was a purely modern distinction that had no basis in the Middle Ages. But my advisers were still a part of the Modern/postmodern world that I was attempting to deconstruct. So my dissertation was recognized for its tactical advances, but strategically I had failed to make the case that the Modern and postmodern worlds were of a piece. They both eschewed logic as the basis of aesthetics for belief in the irrational as the basis of aesthetics. And I could not make the strategic case while I was in graduate school that the irrational poets should be subordinated to logic and reason.

I made a mess of Kant in my dissertation. It was only after I was out of graduate school that I read Kant again I realized my mistake. I had thought that Kant had given us a two-tier system, just like Plato. But in fact he had given us a four-tier system. I completely missed this in my dissertation.

Whether recognized after I got out of graduate school was that Kant was working in the Aufklarung (Enlightement). He was dedicated to the principle of putting everything under the control of reason. However, reason has the stigma of operating on the principles of division. His Critique of Judgment was an attempt to tie the loose ends of logic back to the metaphysical principles (categories) that govern our perception of the world.

Kant’s student Herder fled Kant’s strictly rational control for Hamann, under whom he learned to take the “whole person” (and the whole object) into account, not just that which could be subordinated to rational principles. Kant had originally denied the principle of genius, which Herder introduced into the critical vocabulary; but eventually he managed to give a “rational” definition of genius in the Critique of Judgment. It was this that Goethe acknowledged as Kant’s only work that he would deign to read.

Being a medievalist at heart, I mistook Kant for a Romantic. It was only after I had gotten out of graduate school that I realized that Kant had been roped into the program of Herder and Hamann, and it was on this basis that the theory of genius, theory of symbol, and the theory of allegory were perpetuated into our 20th (and 21st) century lives.

I had attacked Kant for his Romantic theory of genius and I was hoping to reassert reason, but Kant himself had hoped to revive reason. It was in his quest to subordinate everything to the program of reason that he had finally broken down and given us the psychology of aesthetic judgment. My target should have been Herder and Goethe (the progenitors of the Sturm and Drang), for it was in the Sturm and Drang that reason lost its hold on the mind. But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
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