In his memoirs, Henry Crabb Robinson describes meeting Mme de Stael and at her request giving her tips about German literature and philosophy, which she had an extremely vague grasp of, since she had no German to speak of. She remained impervious to the poetry of Goethe, whom Robinson attempted to reveal to her: one of his subtlest & wittiest epigrams left her cold because "she was precisely what Charles Lamb supposes all the Scotch to be - incapable of *feeling* a joke." Likewise she got Kant all wrong, apostrophising him in her *De l'Allemagne* as "un coeur sensible"! In Weimar, Voss, Goethe and Schiller abominated and avoided her. It does seem rather likely that Mr Ticknor was pleased to hear a cheap witticism directed at Fichte's philosophy because he himself had also understood nothing. Years later she engaged A.W. Schlegel as a tutor for her children - years later she told H.C.R. that she could not have written her book without Schlegel's aid. She told H.C.R. that anything she did not understand was not worth understanding. Na ja. If you want to learn something of German letters in the great age of the Klassiker, Romantiker & Philosophen, you would do better to read the relevant parts of H.C.R.'s diaries, letters & memoirs (which are online at the Internet Archive - http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=henry%20crabb%20robinson%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts) plus Heine's little book *On the history of religion and philosophy in Germany*.
mj
Wenn vollkommene Herrschaft über seinen Gegenstand die freie kunstreiche Ausbildung desselben möglich macht, so können doch die künstlichen Schraubengänge der Polemik nicht die Form der Philosophie sein.
If perfect mastery of one's subject makes its free, artistic development possible, then the merely artificial turns of the polemical screw cannot be the form of philosophy.
F.W.J. Schelling
----- Original Message -----
From: Max Richards
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2009 10:37 PM
Subject: Re: Thoughtmesh Snap
Quoting David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>:
> Judy
> I always recall the joke about the great German philosopher who had
> distilled his teaching into three volumes: twenty years had passed by and
> volumes one and two had appeared but everyone was waiting for the third
> volume because all the verbs were in that.
Apropos... Richard Holmes in the current NYRB online discusses recent books on
Madame de Stael...[Goodden wrote one of them]:
The American traveler George Ticknor gave a memorably funny picture of her
working over the philosopher Fichte, and sorting out his entire metaphysical
system in less than "fifteen minutes or so." Goodden characteristically quotes at
length this piece of intellectual ping-pong, which de Staël ends with a
convincing smash:
Ah! c'est assez, je comprends parfaitement Monsieur Fichté. Your system is
perfectly illustrated by a story in Baron Munchausen's travels.
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