… You gave an assignment: “For Wednesday, prepare the speech that Alcibiades should have given to avoid being exiled during the Peloponnesian war.” You can see very quickly that this sort of thing is a perfect school for historicist thinking!
And for forgery, as it happens.
Quite right. When I sat down to write Forgers and Critics, what I wanted to do was think my way through the long tradition of reasoning about the coherence and character of the past, but I ultimately came to a slightly disturbing conclusion: forgery was deeply rooted in this tradition, as deeply rooted as ways of thinking about the past that we might now call historical or philological. After all, that notion of the integrity of an historical epoch — that sense of what is possible and impossible in a given period — is literary as much as it is historical.
That’s from Deception as a Way of Knowing: A Conversation with Anthony Grafton, in Cabinet (Spring 2009). The person doing the interviewing — text in bold in the excerpts – is D.Graham Burnett. Picking up later in the interview, this is Grafton:
Ventriloquizing the dead is a touchy business. Take the great example of the historical Faust. Not Goethe’s Faust, but the actual German conjurer and itinerant magician of that name who studied at the University of Heidelberg and wandered around the inns and towns of central Germany in the 1530s. There is a story that when he was teaching temporarily at Erfurt, he stood up at a school banquet and offered to bring back the lost Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence. What fun, right? Nope. Apparently the faculty got up in arms about the proposition. Why? They feared that the Devil might well have interpolated all kinds of horrible, scary, dangerous things into those texts, and that if Faust brought them back to life, he’d be revivifying these satanic elements.
And still later, starting with Burnett in bold:
That sort of paranoia makes me think of the other great deceiver that looms over early modern theories of knowledge: Descartes’s “Evil Deceiver” of the Meditations. If ever the idea of deception played a critical role in epistemology it was here, since Descartes set to the task of regrounding philosophical inquiry precisely by imagining that some sort of evil genie had insinuated itself into the core of his being. Descartes wants to know if it is possible to establish anything as “true” if we consider a worst-case scenario: a Mephistophelean Wizard of Oz who orchestrates the theater of our sensory life, a demon who can conjure everything that seems to us to be reality — what we see, what we touch, what we hear, all of it might be a diabolical puppet show. How would we know? Does the very possibility of certainty wither in the face of this hypothetical? Descartes thinks that the only kind of knowledge we could feel confident about would be knowledge that could face down this nightmare possibility. It is a very odd way to think about thinking.
But is it? On the contrary, Descartes’s idea was in the air all around him in the early seventeenth century. It is we modern readers who are really deceived. We read Descartes, we read Galileo, and we think, “This guy’s really one of us. He’s a modern.” I mean we can imagine having a conversation with Descartes in a way that we probably can’t imagine having a conversation with, say, a rather overzealous chap like Martin Luther. There is only a century between them, but Descartes feels much more like our contemporary. But don’t fool yourself! Descartes’s Evil Deceiver isn’t a philosophical heuristic, it’s the basic anxiety of a late fifteenth-century Dominican!
[ ... ]
I am kindling a large fire here for all these Satanists…
You and a fair number of early modern prosecutors. These folks, with their great witch-finding handbook, the Malleus Malificarum, exterminated some 50,000 to 70,000 victims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It’s a pretty extraordinary number. Suffice it to say that this was a universe in which the Devil was pervasive, omnipresent, and continuously working to deceive us. You never know whether the person you are talking to is your friend Graham or Amalek pretending to be Graham.
Read the whole interview if you are interested in questions about historical truth/deception. [ link ]
-Julie
Surely the Malleus Malificarum and all the hocus pocus that it involved is a blot on our collective escutcheon. That would include others like Savonarola and his “Bonfire of the Vanities.” I, for one, happen to like vanities.
Comment by Dr. C. — June 5, 2009 @ 8:02 am
*alarmed — examining her escutcheon closely*
“Our” escutcheon? I … I … hardly know you.
Comment by unrealnature — June 5, 2009 @ 2:25 pm