Joan Mitchell, "Hemlock," 1956

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The Making of a Villain

This was a baby paper I wrote for a baby class when I was a baby, circa 2017

One month after Donald Trump was elected President, the popular Comedy Central television show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: WORLD PEACE (MDE) was cancelled by the Time Warner owned network. It’s cancellation was certainly not due to poor ratings — the show’s premiere episode had over a million viewers, despite airing in the 12:15 AM time slot. While the show itself was certainly transgressive, that was nothing new for the network that has aired South Park for 21 seasons. What was it about MDE that made it so uniquely intolerable? This paper seeks to explicate some of the details behind the story of MDE’s cancellation, and then aims to put this episode in conversation with John Milton and Henry Parker in an effort to describe the limits and consequences of “free speech.”

In an article titled “‘Adult Swim’ Fired Me For Supporting Donald Trump — Here’s How It Went Down,” MDE’s frontman, Sam Hyde, explained the cancellation this way:

“Well, they cancelled it. Million Dollar Extreme Presents: WORLD PEACE, Adult Swim’s politically intolerable comedy show has been ethnically cleansed from late night cable. America’s young weed-pipe-hitters are safe from Sam Hyde, Nick Rochefort, and Charls Carroll’s racist mind control, protected from sick ‘alt-right’ jokes about public school and tap water. Be careful — there might be a swastika hidden in this paragraph. Can you find it?" [1]

The full story goes something like this: until Trump’s election victory, no one in the brass at Comedy Central was concerned about MDE. Hyde claims that the show had been green lighted for a second season, with a contract for 100 episodes on the horizon. Then, Trump won. A week later, Brett Gelman, a comedian who had produced a special for Comedy Central, publicly cut ties with the network, citing two primary grievances: the lack of shows made by women, and the publication of MDE. [2] Tim Heidecker, a Comedy Central heavyweight and supporter of Gelman, joined in calling for the show’s cancellation. Apparently, even Judd Apatow — who has no formal relationship to Comedy Central — called the network and demanded that the show be removed. Three weeks after Gelman’s letter, Mike Lazzo, MDE’s executive producer, pulled the plug. [3]

The repercussions of this decision are still being played out almost a year later. Hyde, who was always more of a theatrical provocateur than bona fide klansman, has gone straight off the deep end. Clearly, garnering his own Comedy Central series only to lose it a year later in humiliating fashion by being personally blacklisted by the heavyweights of American comedy took its toll on the young comic’s soul. Hyde, and many of his fans, have begun to whole heartedly embrace what had previously been simply a “post-ironic” lampoon. They have taken up residence on the “Million Dollar Extreme” subreddit, an active community where phrases such as “Neo-liberal Globogayplex” are uttered with an alarmingly serious tone. Hyde himself has since published a 744 page “art/comedy book” titled How to BOMB the US Gov’t, which is available through an internet hyperlink that I refuse to click on.

Other than Hyde, who went through this whole process kicking and screaming, most of the other people involved have remained silent on the issue after succeeding in getting the show cancelled. Heidecker and Gelman cited the vicious hate mail they were receiving as reason to stop commenting on the show, while Comedy Central, Time Warner and Judd Apatow refused to explicate their side of the story. [4]

There are a couple of features of this event that I want to highlight before moving on to a discussion of Milton and Parker. First, this is not an episode of pre-publication censorship. A full season of the show was aired, and while there were micromanaged moments of prepublication censorship throughout the first season, for the most part the show was allowed to go on as it pleased. [5] Second, the act of censorship was not mandated by the state, or by a corporation per se, but by individual and influential comedians, at least one of whom (Apatow) had no formal affiliation with the show or the network. Third, the aftermath of the act of censorship was a theater totally dominated by Hyde, the object of censor. Those who enacted the censor refused to engage in public debate over its merits. With these three features in mind, I turn to Milton and Parker in an attempt to think through what occurred with the censoring of MDE, and what could have gone better.

First, I would like to discuss the fact that the show was allowed to air for a season before being censored. John Milton, in his Areopagitica, remarks that “Truth is compar'd in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick'n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.” For Milton, this means that truth is something that must always be actively pursued with rigor and reason, or else one risks “be[ing] a heretic in the truth” — believing what happens to be true for no principled reason. [6] In order for people to be justified in their condemnation of MDE, the show needed to be available for them to see. If Comedy Central had refused to air the show in the first place, or heavily censored all of their scripts during the first season, it would be difficult for an audience member to make an informed opinion about the show. Further, Milton warns that authors must take responsibility for their work by attaching their name to it — something which Hyde did proudly. Finally, Milton suggests that if any published text should be found dangerous after public deliberation, that it can indeed be rightly burned or discarded. Thus, Comedy Central’s decision to end the show after receiving feedback from members of the comedy community is also seemingly in line with Milton’s project regarding free speech and censorship.

Second, as Parker would have approved, it was the influential members within Hyde’s own guild that sanctioned and censored him. [7] While Apatow, Gelman and Heidecker may not have framed their understanding of their obligations in such stark tones of deference to the state that Parker employs, it is clear that all three of them imagined their action to be political in a somewhat similar sense — as advocates of a flavor of communal morality. This feature is made explicit by the role of the election in this story. Before Trump was elected, MDE was seemingly a problematic but ultimately harmless corner of the network. After Trump was elected, MDE became a virulent threat that needed to be eliminated. The relevance of politics to this story firmly anchors Apatow, Gelman and Heidecker in the tradition of public “gatekeepers” — persons of status within the community who serve as arbiters of taste as well as policemen of virtue.

However, if the immediate action of censorship in the case of MDE was followed by a distinct lack of vigorous defense. This abdication of responsibility by those who mobilized their influence against the show has had some devastating consequences. Much like David Cressy’s arguments about the Star Chamber and William Prynne, Hyde has used his personal charisma in the wake of his censor in an attempt to seize a monopoly on the “semiotics” of the theater of censorship. [8] Apatow, Heidecker and Gelman, on the other hand, retreated away from public discourse on the subject, granting Hyde his objective without putting up much of a fight. In this sense, the act of censorship backfired, granting Hyde an even more influential platform from which to preach by making him a martyr in the eyes of his audience. Further, the seriousness of the sanction (being functionally blacklisted from institutional American comedy) gave Hyde additional tools to use in his subversion of his censorship. The fact that Hyde is a professional semiotic saboteur makes him all the more dangerous a subject to censor — something that Comedy Central brass learned the hard way.

What do Parker and Milton have to tell us about the curious case of MDE? First, though the two have some significant disagreements about the nature of censorship, the immediate act of censoring MDE might represent some happy middle ground between them. MDE was not subject to pre-publication censorship, which allowed the public to experience it for themselves and form their own judgements on its righteousness. While Parker might have been uncomfortable with this (and potentially for good reason, as many in the public clearly “got it wrong” and found MDE worthwhile), he would have been somewhat sated with the knowledge that the guild masters of American comedy still had some firm control over the show’s destiny, and ultimately exercised that power to kill it. This important role of publishers as gatekeepers was still in place, even if they decided to allow the show to run for a season before ending it. However, the aftermath of the censorship was a distinct failure by both Parker and Milton’s standards. The censors did not take sufficient responsibility for their act of censorship, which allowed the author of the “bad book” himself to take the reigns of theater and garner a monopoly on the attempted “semiotic control.” Thus, the act of censorship ultimately backfired, causing a transient web of fans to entrench themselves as a true community some year and a half later, with Hyde himself as their fearless leader. Further, unlike the censors in East Germany discussed by Darnton, who in some cases attempted to keep troublesome writers in line with the state by enticing them with certain perks, Hyde has lost any stake he had in the mainstream American comedy institution, thus eliminating any leverage that the community could wield against him in an effort to corral his work. Thus, if there is a lesson to be learned here, it is this: censor at your own risk, and be willing to publicly defend your judgement. If you neglect that responsibility, you surrender control of the theater of censorship to those who you seek to silence.

[1] Sam Hyde and Don Jolly, “‘Adult Swim’ Fired Me For Supporting Donald Trump — Here’s How It Went Down” in The Daily Caller. 12/9/16.

[2] Megh Wright, “Brett Gelman Explains His Decision to Cut Ties with Adult Swim” in Splitsider. 11/14/16.

[3] David Weigel, “The Story Behind the Sudden Cancellation of Adult Swim’s Trump-Loving Comedy Show” in The Washington Post. 12/23/16

[4] Ibid

[5] Hyde cites a moment where the John Maus’s song “Cop Killer” was replaced in a scene with a different John Maus song, “Hey Moon.” See “‘Adult Swim’ Fired Me for Supporting Donald Trump.”

[6] John Milton, Areopagitca

[7] As Parker writes in his Humble Remonstrance, “But as to the first and publike aym of regulation in Printing ... The main care is to appoint severe Examiners for the licensing of things profitable, and the suppressing of things harmful.” Henry Parker, Humble Remonstrance, 66.

[8] David Cressy, “Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart England,” Sixteenth Century Journal, pp. 359-374.

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On Losing Birdsongs

Consider in this context the words of Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman: “Look at that picture over there!” The first human to lay eyes on an Earthrise made intuitive appeal to a language that is the staple of tourists everywhere—to describe not the sight itself, but the conditions in which the sight could first be disclosed or come into view, its frame. It may be the most definitive confirmation possible of Heidegger's claim, made thirty years before, that “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.” - Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, the Globalization of the World Picture,” The American Historical Review, vol. 116, no. 3 (2011), 602-630.

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The source of the moral authority of nature (at least within the tradition we have been investigating) is sentimentality. In modern words, it is the need to take a picture. At least that’s my cheeky answer. Darwin called this “memory” or something, the things that embarrass us. But he was a sentimentalist and a gentleman. It is true that one goes to amusement parks to ride rides, but one goes to Disney World to take pictures.

This act of picturing is how Rachel Carson began her own polemic in Silent Spring: with the framing of Anytown, USA. “The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard …”.

It was the conquest of the world as picture that made the anthropocene thinkable as an era. This is where Carson proceeded immediately after her description of Anytown: “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.”

Naturally, as a 17th-century partisan, I disagree with her chronology but I think she and Hartin Meidegger are right in tying the “world as picture” to epochal shift. McKibben struck a similar tune: “for the first time human beings had become so large that they [we?] altered everything around us.” (xviii) The checkerboard was bending under the town’s increasing gravity.

McKibben is invested in displaying the climatological proof of the profound novelty of modernity in natural systems at all scales: Russian tundra, the Atlantic ocean, global temperature. In spite of the evidence, though, “we’re not getting it.” We can see the cliff and still we walk towards it. (But wait, isn’t the point of the globe that there are no edges of the earth?)

Thanks to his solar panels, McKibben gets “the pleasure of watching [his] electric meter spin backwards.” Further, “My hybrid Honda Civic gets me fifty-seven miles to the gallon.” One assumes he drives it always in reverse as well.

Although in many ways a consequence of 2008, it was under Obama that the US—driven by new techniques in hydraulic fracturing—fundamentally transformed global energy markets. The result was a limit on OPEC power: should the Brent Crude Index ever cross around $80/barrel, the Permian Basin fields flood with workers and the salary of a McDonald’s employee in Midland, Texas goes up to $25/hr (and the rent there gets like Manhattan).

Of course, we now have earthquakes in Oklahoma and some Texans can light the water that comes from their faucets on fire. The vulgar early moderns would have considered these events disasters, or monstrous harbingers of troubled times.

Let me tell you a story about this company Cheniere Energy (AMEX: $LNG). They started off in the early Bush years building liquified natural gas (LNG) import terminals in southern Louisiana. After the shale take-off, their business model got crushed, so they tore down the LNG import terminals and started building LNG export terminals in Houston, which finally came online in 2016.

The stock price of this company has gone up about 30% since February 23rd of 2022, and that is in spite of the fact that this 20-year-old company spent the first decade of its existence building really expensive doors that opened the wrong way. Cheniere’s longest-term contract (25 years, signed 2018) is with Taiwan, but given Germany’s recent change-of-heart on various matters, that could be matched soon. In fact, I believe some of those Taiwanese shipments have already been rerouted to Europe.

The irony is that nuclear power is probably the most reasonable way to replace the fossil fuel use underpinning national electric grids (and with widespread electric cars this could also mean displacing fossil fuels at the pump), but nuclear stuff is the only thing that makes sentimentalists more nervous than climate change. Why?

For good reason perhaps, but if our strongest arguments against nuclear power are sentimental I am not sure we have the luxury for them much longer. On that note, I’ve got a great Uranium mine I’d love to sell you in Canada …

In other words, ending “climate change” is a project for the end of history. Turns out we haven’t made it there yet.

As a historian, I am a professional sentimentalist, so I am hardly above reproach on these matters. Pictures of the world are all we have. But we have a thousand-million of them. And in the whole they likely add up to something more profound than a normal curve, anyway. “Or, to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: We are all much more artists than we know …”

We may, to borrow Carson’s metaphor, be losing the songs of some birds. This is a real tragedy comprehendible by anyone who can grasp the meaning of that word. But there is a reason why Darwin could never be a doctor (much less a surgeon), and it seems similar to the reason he decided not to believe in God [1]. He was a sentimentalist, and a gentleman.

If McKibben et al are correct, then the doctors have prognosticated. They have prescribed a course of treatment, to have begun last week. The patient has refused, and shows no signs of relenting.

Our “Fable for tomorrow” needs less doctors. We will either need surgeons, or priests. Probably both. “Some find this a convenient assumption, but as a chart for a course of action it is highly dangerous…” (Carson, 246). What isn’t dangerous these days? Going to a library. That’s where you will find me this week, still reading 1688: The First Modern Revolution. Apparently they didn’t need too many surgeons for that one, actually.

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[1] Darwin claimed to not believe in God because his brother and father were both avowed atheists, and if God did exist they would be in Hell. Darwin was not willing to consider such a circumstance, and so found disbelief soothing. This lack of a stomach for harsh truths is similar to his propensity to faint at the sight of blood, which is why he didn't make it in medical school.

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Impartiality, or: An Anatomy of a Labyrinthine Dispute

"The past always speaks as an oracle: only as master builders of the future who know the present will you understand it. We now explain the extraordinarily deep and extensive effect of Delphi especially by the fact that the priests of Delphi had exact knowledge of the past; now it is proper to know that only the builder of the future has a right to judge the past.” - Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

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For Cicero, history was the teacher of life. Historia magistra vitae was made available through the voice of the orator whose eloquence operated in service of advocacy. [1] Bede echoed Cicero’s view, suggesting that the examples of history, framed powerfully, could arouse the “careful listener” to “seek all the more carefully those things which he has learned to be good and worthy.” [2] Yet if history is accessed through oration (or, more commonly today, narration), perhaps Cicero’s famous line is guilty of a rhetorical sleight of hand. History is not the teacher of life, historians are. Or at least they used to be.

Reinhart Koselleck has referred to this position as the “old topos,” which envisioned a contiguous symmetry of the present with the past. [3] This symmetry justified the pedagogical utility of history by deriving it from the limited (perhaps non-existent) distance between the experiences of the past and the expectations of the future. If the world of today is like the world of yesterday, then the lessons of yesterday might bear directly on our future conduct in a sort of straightforward way—history as comprised of iterations rather than transformations. Under the old topos, then, experience generated timeless lessons. The primary objective of the historian-as-orator was to imbue these lessons with an eloquence that bound listeners to respect them. Thucydides' record of Pericles’ funeral oration did not aim to capture the speech as it was given, but to preserve for posterity the vital command to spend one’s life in service to their city. [4] In a word, the old topos demanded that the historian be partial to their history. The point was to write a history worth believing in. What “actually” happened was a matter of detail only of interest to the pedant. Far more important was to express what ought to happen, for establishing such an ought was the purpose of historia magistra vita. To allow the clarity and force of rhetoric to be sidelined by an undue emphasis on the particulars would be a mistake.

Yet this position did not exist without detractors. What if the relationship between the experience of the past and the expectation of the future was more fraught than the orator let on? The alienation of expectation from experience is the characteristic feature of “modern times” for Koselleck, but even Aristotle insisted on the indeterminacy of the future and thus on the limits of rhetorical exhortation to serve as an infallible guide to action. [5] As a result, the historian cannot (unlike the Delphic Oracle) offer a prophecy of the future built from a perfect knowledge of the past. Not only is such a perfect knowledge unattainable, but the irreducible contingency of historical transformation entails that even a perfect historical knowledge would fail as a complete guide to future action. Koselleck suggested that it was the American historian Henry Adams who first grasped this problem in its fullness, and argued rather pessimistically that “all the teacher could hope for was to teach [the mind] reaction.” [6]

The insertion of distance between expectation and experience fueled what Anthony Grafton has called “the problem of authority in writing about the past.” This problem, which (in Grafton’s telling, as well as in Koselleck’s) emerged most fully in the 17th Century, resulted in the formation of perhaps the key formal element of professional historical writing: the footnote:

“The seventeenth century, after all, saw the scientific authority of the ancients deconstructed by Bacon, Descartes, Boyle and Pascal; the political authority of kings deconstructed by French Frondeurs and English Puritans; and the historical authority of the Bible deconstructed by La Peyrère and Spinoza. Questions of authority and evidence posed themselves on every side. Whose descriptions of the behavior of a barometer or a comet, a new substance or a new island, deserved belief? Any intellectual of the late seventeenth century necessarily confronted these and other questions of intellectual authority—and had to devise protocols for providing assurances that could quell the doubts of skeptical readers.” [7]

The right of the ancient orator to speak in the first place was won by authority, and it was authority (lubricated by rhetoric) that had served as the ultimate justification for their pronouncements. Once authority became an object of open suspicion, fierce contests erupted in virtually every domain of intellectual life. These contests propelled the cultivation of impartiality as an epistemic virtue. [8] The historian as orator, who spoke history into life as rhetoric, was replaced by the historian as compiler, “who necessarily preserved even what was distasteful [and] offered the critical reader as much truth as human effort could obtain.”[9]

The emergence of impartiality as a dominant epistemic virtue of the historian around the year 1700 is the subject of this paper. [10] Grafton, in his story focused on the Continent, has argued for the “Cartesian origins” of this shift. [11] This paper operates in the same chronological frame, but focuses instead on the Anglo-Scot context. As many of the influential characters in Grafton’s book belonged to this tradition, rather than the continental one (with the obvious asterisk that the two contexts cannot be so easily separated), it is worth investigating what was going on in the British context during those crucial years. [12]

I argue that these participants in struggles over historical scholarship occupied a complicated relationship to im/partiality. Rather than an immediate shift from rhetoric to evidence based history writing, some historians of late 17th-century England and Scotland utilized performances of impartiality to advance their partisan arguments. Others, sensitive to the tension inherent in the call to impartiality and the desire to utilize the authority of history to advocate for a partisan cause, criticized such moves. These critics still thought that history could be a teacher of life, but that the crucial element was not the orator/narrator, but the listener/reader. The aim of history was not to use rhetoric to compel the impressionable, but to present sufficient evidence for a critical reader to make up their own mind. In the first view, of performed impartiality, impartiality is a rhetorical strategy rather than an epistemic virtue. It is only in the second approach, the critical one, that impartiality becomes epistemically dominant. I return to this point in the conclusion of this paper, and argue that impartiality of this critical kind ought to remain a virtue for the historian of our own “modern times.”

An Anatomy of a Labyrinthine Dispute: The Wood-Wharton-Burnet-Wood Debate of 1693

This paper discusses the intertwined conflict of three contemporary historians and one of their lawyers. The dramatis personae are:

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Anthony à Wood, lifelong Oxford antiquary and known curmudgeon.

Henry Wharton, two-tongued (literally) wunderkind and impetuous upstart. [13]

Gilbert Burnet, renowned historian, influential statesman and one time associate of notorious Dutch footnoter Jean Le Clerc. [14]

Thomas Wood, Anthony à Wood’s nephew and lawyer.

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The conflict, which properly conflagrated around 1693, requires a bit of exposition to become coherent. In that year, Wood was sued for libel in the Oxford university court by Henry Hyde, 2nd Earl of Clarendon. [15] The suit concerned the description of Henry’s father Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, that appeared in Wood’s series of biographies of important Oxford graduates. The offending section is not Edward Hyde’s own entry, which is written in a generally positive tone. [16] Rather, the libel charge was directed at a comment found in an entry on the totally obscure royalist judge David Jenkins. Jenkins, who had spent the years between 1650 and 1657 languishing in the Tower after being convicted by the Commons of publishing treasonous pamphlets, was hopeful that the Restoration would see him return to distinguished office. According to Wood, Jenkins was on track to have been made a judge of Westminster Hall “would he have given money to the then Lord Chancellour [Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon]; but our Author scorning such an act after all his Sufferings, he retired to his Estate in Glamorganshire, then restored to him after the loss of it, and all he had, for many years.” [17] Henry Hyde could not stand to see his father’s reputation besmirched in the biographic compendium of the university which he had served as Chancellor, and leveraged his own position as a trustee to bring the case to the special jurisdiction of the Oxford university court. [18] Wood’s creative efforts to have the case dismissed, and to settle the issue by publishing a muted retraction in his almost-completed third volume, were in vain. Hyde won the case, and Wood was expelled from the Oxford community. The offending page of at least Henry Hyde’s copy of the book was publicly burned. Wood died a little more than a year later, at the age of 62.

It is worth investigating Wood’s defense to examine what the historian imagined to be at stake in the case. Perhaps sensing that Hyde’s blatant Jacobitism and corresponding open hostility to the new Williamite regime meant that his power was radically circumscribed to the boundaries of the University of Oxford, Wood attempted to argue that the prosecution could not prove that he himself had written the offending remarks. [19] Instead, Wood’s defense claimed, the real culprit could have been any number of individuals in London who had access to the manuscript as it was in the process of being printed. The aim of this rather odd defense seems clear: if the libel had been committed not by the author residing in Oxford, but by a printer in London, then the Oxford university court would not be the proper venue for the libel case to proceed. In private, however, Wood did not try to deny his authorship of the offending remarks. Wood only insisted on avoiding an overt public apology, which the prosecution had demanded and refused to compromise on. Wood’s reasoning, expressed in his manuscript notes on the case, was that “submission if publick, no body will hereafter communicate records or letters” to him. [20] As such communications were a crucial part of his biographic methodology, he worried that giving too public of an apology would not only harm his reputation, but limit the resources available for his scholarly projects in the future. [21] While the lawsuit itself proved to be something of an “open-and-shut” case, the trial produced a string of commentary from both defenders of Wood and supporters for Hyde. The discrete issues between Wood and Hyde over the elder Clarendon’s legacy only served as a catalyst for this debate, however, which quickly blew out beyond the narrow confines of the merits of Hyde’s libel case and became, instead, a fight over one of the most politically sensitive issues of the 1690s: the history of the Church of England.

The problem began in private. After the publication of the highly regarded first volume of his History of the Reformation in 1679 (the year in which anxiety over the infamous “Popish Plot” reached its fever pitch, and took on legislative form as the exclusion crisis), the eminent future Bishop of Salisbury Gilbert Burnet encouraged anyone who had disagreements with his account of the events of Henry VIII’s founding of the Church to get in touch with him: “I had invited all that could give me further light into those matters, to communicate their Remarks or Discoveries to me, and promised both to Retract my Mistakes, and acknowledge from whose hands I had received better Information.” [22] More than a decade later, in 1692 or 1693, a young Lambeth Palace librarian, Henry Wharton, took Burnet up on his offer. [23] Wharton had been appointed to his position at Lambeth in the Autumn of 1688, as Williamite forces made their landing on English soil. [24] He was only 24 years old, but “was clearly marked out for rapid promotion.” [25] By 1691, he had finished production of his ambitious Anglia Sacra, an exhaustive and systemic compilation of manuscript chronicles and commentary on the English medieval church which runs for 1500 folio pages. [26]

Wharton, propelled perhaps by his apparently characteristic “pertness and immodesty,” set himself to offer Burnet some corrections, and it seems that Burnet did not take kindly to them. All that Wharton did, claimed Burnet, was “send me a passage [from] the Second Part of [Wood’s] Athenæ Oxonienses.” [27] If this was the first of their contact, it must have been quite recent, as the relevant second volume of Wood’s book had just been published in 1692. [28] Wharton did not take Burnet’s quick dismissal of his offer of correction sitting down, and decided to make this private matter public, rushing to pen a text (published under the pseudonym of Anthony Harmer) which severely escalated the conflict. [29] This response, a line by line refutation of every point of error he could find in Burnet’s History, was as detailed as it was uncompromising. [30] Running for a over 100 pages, Wharton’s most damning critique from the perspective of a 21st-century historian was his indictment of Burnet’s appendix of published primary sources, which Wharton, upon checking the manuscript material, found significantly lacking in transcriptive accuracy. [31] But the more politically explosive accusation, the one stemming from the Anthony à Wood citation, had to do with something much more serious: the role played by the universities in annulling the marriage between Henry VIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon. Burnet had argued in his History that “no money or bribes were given” to procure academic support for the King’s cause. Wharton, citing both Cornelius Agrippa and William Cavendish, proclaimed the opposite: that the commissioners Henry had sent to make his case to the universities were equipped with “such great Summs of Money, that [the faculty] did easily condescend to [the commissioners] Requests, and grant their Desires[,] by reason whereof all the Commissioners returned ... furnished .. under the Seal of every several University.” [32] Because Wood had also emphasized this discrepancy in Burnet’s text, Wharton and Wood’s previously unrelated scholarship became joined through this 1693 debate with Burnet.

As Wood was being sued for libel, and Wharton was merely an impudent and troubled youth, Burnet took this opportunity to kill both birds with one stone. He immediately cast suspicion on Wood’s work, and claimed he “did not expect to see a Writer of his [Wharton’s] Rank, descend so low as to cite such a Scribler, especially upon such an occasion. That poor Writer has thrown together such a tumultuary mixture of Stuff and Tattle, and has been so visibly a Tool of some of the Church of Rome ... that no Man who takes care of his own Reputation, will take any thing upon trust that is said by one that has no Reputation to lose.” [33] Burnet, however, did not spend too much time on specifics in his defense, explaining that it had been thirteen long years since he originally published the first volume of his History and that, while he still had his notes, the shameful reputation of the libelous Wood meant that he did not really need to consult them. [34]

Burnet’s leveraging of Wood’s novel status as a libeler to defuse Wharton’s rigorous critiques leads to a final ingredient of this labyrinthine dispute: a response to Burnet’s A Letter ... Concerning ... Anthony Harmer penned by Anthony à Wood’s nephew Thomas Wood, then still a young lawyer who had served as proctor for Anthony during his libel case. [35] Thomas Wood’s riposte to Burnet, entitled A Vindication of the Historiographer, is a resounding defense of Anthony Wood’s work. Anthony, who had been endorsed by the “Chief Heads” of Oxford prior to his conflict with the 2nd Earl of Clarendon, was hardly the “Scribler, or poor Writer” that Burnet dismissed him as. [36] According to Thomas, Anthony was instead a deadly serious scholar, and it was only because his history “tread too close on the heels of time” that the author found himself in trouble. [37]

Thomas Wood’s account of this dispute puts the question of the divorce of Henry and Catherine front and center. He begins with Burnet’s account from the first volume of his History of the Reformation, in which Burnet disparaged Anthony Wood (who he describes as “the collector of the Antiquities of Oxford”) for giving “Credit to a Lying Story ... of an Assembly called by Night” in which the University’s seal was “extorted by force; and being done without the consent ... was of its self void and of no force.” [38] With Burnet’s remarks outlined, Thomas proceeded to answer them rigorously. The first thing that Thomas Wood did was point to the sources that Anthony had used justify his depiction of the underhanded action by the King, to prove that Anthony “did not frame, or give those Reasons from his own Invention, but from Authors of Credit in the time they Lived.” The most important of these sources cited by Anthony in his original account was a Manuscript collection titled An Apology for the Government of the University of Oxon against King Henry the Eighth, which (according to Thomas) “hath all the Kings Letters therein, written to the University about the Question of Marriage and Divorce.” [39]

In a move recognizable to 21st-century historians as something of a checkmate, Thomas then chastises Burnet for not only missing these letters in the course of his research, but insinuates that Burnet deliberately excluded them from his narrative. Such an act, which Thomas Wood claimed was a result of “much Partiality,” proved that Burnet was “not fit to be an Historian.” I quote this account in full:

“Now forasmuch has the said Church-Historian doth often quote and make use of several Manuscripts and Records in the Cottonian Library, it would be well worth the Curiosity of some Persons, to Enquire why he did not make use of a certain Volume in that Library, under Faustina, c. 7. containing Letters sent from, and Copies of Charters, Privileges, &c. of the University of Oxon: In which Letters are several Matters relating to the Reformation of the said University by certain Commissioners appointed by King Henry the Eighth, Anno 1535. To which may be Answered, that there being many Vile things in the said Letters, which tend rather to the Deformation of the said University, (a Nursery to supply the Church) they would have spoiled the smooth Current of his History of Reformation: And if so, as several Curious Persons have supposed, it doth, under favour, Argue much Partiality; and he that is Partial, is not fit to be an Historian.” [40]

Burnet never seems to have responded to Thomas Wood’s attacks. Perhaps he was unbothered by criticism from a young lawyer whose principal published associates were a convicted libeler (Wood) and self-righteous non-juror (Wharton). From my perspective, however, Thomas Wood’s incisive defense of his Uncle’s careful scholarship gives the lie to Burnet’s feigned impartiality.

Burnet attempted to grant his History of the Reformation authority through a claim that he was simply relaying the truths contained within the source material to the best of his ability. This move was secured both by the printing of transcriptions of many primary sources as an appendix to the work, as well as his insistence that anyone who had found conflicting evidence should write to him, and that he would gladly acknowledge his mistakes and offer public retractions. Wharton had already indicted the veracity of Burnet’s manuscript transcriptions, as mentioned above. But it is Burnet’s refusal to engage in good faith argument with Wood over the heated question of the divorce that is most damning. Immediately upon encountering a dispute of serious consequence backed up by significant archival evidence, Burnet retreated to the realm of ad hominem attack, charging his opponent as a libelous scribbler and servant of Popery. He had no substantive defense to offer.

Burnet claimed that he could not imagine “upon what design” Anthony Wood had in mind when he made his explosive allegations about the divorce. Thomas Wood, insisting that Anthony “hath through the whole course of his Life declined the pursuit of any private interest” had no ulterior motives: “There was no design at all in the matter, but only for Truth’s sake, which very few in these Days will deliver.” [41]

//

With the contours of this admittedly complex dispute outlined, the final section of this paper returns to the question of impartiality as epistemic virtue. In the introduction, I argued that impartiality became an epistemic virtue in the discipline of history as a response to what Anthony Grafton called “the crisis of authority.” This crisis was connected to the gulf that had been opened between expectation and experience (as described by Reinhart Koselleck), in which the received wisdom of the ancients was subjected to scrutiny. The possibility of the Ciceronian ideal of history as the teacher of life was problematized by the seemingly evident fact that the future would be radically different from the past. The “old topos” was characterized by the historian-as-orator who was essentially partial to what they took to be the timeless morals imbedded in their accounts. The duty of the historian-as-orator was to articulate these lessons in rhetorically powerful ways, so that their listeners would be compelled to emulate what was good and avoid what was evil. The new topos, associated with what Koselleck called “modern times,” was a fundamental break with this position. The historian of modern times, rather than aiming for clean moral lessons, “necessarily preserved even what was distasteful [and] offered the critical reader as much truth as human effort could obtain.” [42] Following Grafton’s hunch that the crucial transition between these two topoi of historical writing was activated “sometime around 1700, or just before,” this paper has been an attempt to distinguish two modes of appeals to impartiality that were co-present at the moment of its ascension to a epistemic virtue of the historian.

The first mode, caricature-ized [43] in this paper by Burnet, makes appeals to impartiality as a rhetorical strategy. This is something of a hybrid approach that straddles the old and new topoi as they were laid out by Koselleck. Recognizing that the crisis of authority had produced an appetite for citation in one’s readers, impartiality-as-rhetoric gestured to citation and source work in an effort to add heft to their accounts. Here, citation was a technique principally of persuasion.

J. A. I. Champion has summarized this first mode eloquently: “The early modern mind perceived ‘history’ as a means of access to religious and moral rectitude: because of this, historical method and writings, like Burnet’s History of the Reformation, became entrenched in the ideological conflicts of the period ... [and their] methodological apparatus ... was linked to the ideological function of historical discourse. The intellectual disunity of the period meant that participants had to search for some form of authoritative leverage in polemical debate, for a form of knowledge that could be deployed and maintained with a status of certainty and objective truth. History was a means of creating assurance in an audience.” [44] The first volume of Burnet’s history, published in the midst of the intensely charged politico-religious struggle of the exclusion crisis and explicitly framed as a response to French language historiography that denigrated the Church of England and praised the Duke of York’s Catholicism, was a political document. An artifact of Burnet’s well-known latitudinarianism, his History attempted to paint the Church of England as an uncontroversial instrument of national harmony, chastising both the fiery apocalypticism of the Puritan agitators wailing against the radical conspiracy of the “Popish Plot” and the French overtures in support of the future James II’s Galician Catholic predispositions. Thus, the true aim of Burnet’s History—despite its overtures to impartiality— was closer to the Ciceronian ideal of the historian-as-orator. It was a document produced to convince its readers of the just purpose of the Church of England as a, perhaps the, key institution of the English Nation. Some nasty facts, like the underhanded nature of Henry VIII’s divorce, ought to be left out, lest they be seized on by the partisans of Rome and used to delegitimize the besieged English Faith.

The antiquarian Wood and the younger historian Wharton, however, took a different view of the goal of history, a view which I argue positions them as heralds of the new topos of impartiality. The obligation of the historian was not to make a smooth pitch for the value of a timeless lesson, but to provide the critical reader with the materials to make up their own mind. As Wharton put it in his introduction to A Specimen of Some Errors, “To examine the Truth of things proposed, is a privilege common to all men.” [45] The historian had no right to prune their accounts to make them more rhetorically potent, and such a position assumed that the “listeners” of the historian-as-orator lacked the capacity to come to their own judgements. Thus, Wharton argued, all he was doing was taking Burnet’s own “excellent rule” at face value: “that ingenious persons ought not to take things on trust easily, no not from the greatest Authors.” [46]

Thomas Wood, in his vindication of Anthony, makes a similar point. Anthony Wood’s courageous effort to include all the reliable facts that he could gather was a great service to posterity, even though his “treading too close on the heels of time” caused him to die in disgrace, expelled from the University to which he had dedicated his entire life. Anthony’s histories, Thomas argues, “will, without doubt, be of great use to all Persons ... such as apply themselves to History, or Politicks, whom it concerns every Moment to know what kind of Men were the Authors of those Books they Read ... for as the Writing of Authors may be said to be the Picture of the Mind, so to know their Life. Religion, and most remarkable Actions, must needs be a great help towards judging rightly of their Sentiments.” [47]

It is not the duty of the historian to judge. It is the duty of the historian to supply the reader with the materials to furnish their own judgements. This is why, as Thomas Wood made explicit, “He that is partial, is not fit to be an Historian.” [48]

Should historians of the 21st Century retain fidelity to Thomas Wood’s injunction? I think so. The gap between expectation and experience characteristic of “modern times” means that no present-day historian can be confident that our readers will turn to our histories in search of the same lessons that we were after when we wrote them. Of course, our own visions for the future influence our choice of topic. Yet unless we are as sure of the righteousness of our cause as Gilbert Burnet was, we cannot in good conscience claim to be capable of discerning the immortal truth of history. Correspondingly, we lack the authority to prune the facts we deem unhelpful in service of enhancing that immortal truth with the rhetorical power capable of compelling the impressionable, as the Ciceronian orator did. Because we cannot be sure that the lessons needed for today will be the lessons needed for tomorrow, impartiality remains the keystone epistemic virtue for giving voice to the past. “The past always speaks as an oracle: only as master builders of the future who know the present will you understand it.”

~

[1] Cicero, De oratore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 222-224.

[2] Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

[3] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 26.

[4] Thomas Hobbes, Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre (1634), 100-106.

[5] Koselleck points out that Guicciardini turned to Aristotle to open the possibility of his approach to political history: “De futuris contingentibus non est determinata veritas.” See Koselleck, Futures Past, 18.

[6] Such a diminution of the possible advantage of history for life would have horrified Nietzsche. See Koselleck, Futures Past, 42.

[7] Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 205.

[8] "As savage pruning makes hedges bloom and flourish, so savage polemics produced the richest growths of source-notes.” Grafton, The Footnote, 202.

[9] Grafton, The Footnote, 199.

[10] “This clue, the most precise we have yet turned up, indicates that we should look for the origins of the historical footnote a generation or two before Hume—sometime around 1700, or just before.” Grafton, 191.

[11] “To become modern, philology needed the unkind assistance of philosophy. Bayle needed Descartes.” Grafton, The Footnote, 207. Bayle, prompted by Descartes’ critique of historical knowledge in the Discourse on Method “as a pastime no more informative or rigorous than travel,” developed his own project of the Historical and Critical Dictionary to serve as “the insurance exchange of the Republic of letters.” Grafton, The Footnote, 194. Bayle’s near-superhuman rigor produced almost everything necessary for the scholarly apparatus of the footnote with one exception: economy. This fact, pointed out to him by the experienced editor Leibniz, was rectified in the formalizations offered by Le Clerc.

[12] Grafton arrives at this time frame through Hume (above f.n. 10), frequently invokes Gibbon and also mentions the decisive influence of Sir Walter Scott on Ranke. Grafton, The Footnote, 38, 59-60.

[13] Wharton had actually been an infant prodigy, the subject of discussion in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society due to his curious possession of two tongues. See Cromwell Mortimer, “An account of a very learned divine, who was born with two tongues; communicated to the Royal Society by Dr. Cromwell Mortimer M.D. & Secr. R.S.,” The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 45, no. 486 (1748), 232-233. According to Douglas, Wharton was Isaac Newton’s “last private pupil” in mathematics during his time at Cambridge in the early 1680s. See Douglas, English Scholars, 140.

[14] According to T. E. S. Clarke, it was through contact with Dutch Arminans, including Le Clerc, that Burnet was cured of his native Scottish Calvinism. See T. E. S. Clark, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 225. If Grafton’s argument for the continental origins of the footnote, culminating in Le Clerc, are to hold for England, Burnet ought to be a clear candidate as the vector of their transmission.

[15] All of the relevant records of this case, which (due to its extremely rare usage) is “the only suit in the University Court in which anything approaching to a complete set of documents is preserved” have been printed. See The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, antiquary, of Oxford, 1632-1695, described by Himself, Collected from His Diaries and Other Papers, vol. 4, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895).

[16] Anthony à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. 2 (London: Printed for Thomas Bennet, 1691-92), 389-391.

[17] Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. 2, 211-212.

[18] The Hyde family were a pillar of the Oxford community. Not only had the 1st Earl of Clarendon served as the University’s chancellor, but the eventual popularity of the publication of his History of the Rebellion provided the financial basis for the founding of the still-operating Clarendon Press. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Clarendon's' History of the Rebellion'." History Today vol. 29, no. 2 (1979).

[19] It should also be mentioned that Clarendon’s “corruption” was no secret, and the Lord Chancellor had infamously been impeached after the conclusion of the disastrous 2nd Anglo-Dutch war in 1667, and exiled. For the context of Clarendon’s fall, see J. R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1995), esp. chapter 7.

[20] Clark, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, vol. 4, 8. Clark suggests that the existing manuscript evidence points to the original account coming to Wood in a letter from his sometimes collaborator John Aubrey.

[21] Wood’s problem here reminded me of Bayles’ rebuke of the “impractical laws” of the historian: “Nothing is finer in theory than the ideas of the lawgiver of historians. He commands them not to dare to say anything that is false, and to dare to say everything that is true. But these are impractical laws, like those of the Decalogue, given the condition in which the human race finds itself. In addition, let us observe a great difference between such similar laws. Only a perfect wisdom can live according to the Decalogue; and it would be a complete folly to carry out the laws of history. Eternal life is the fruit of obedience to the Decalogue; but temporal death is the almost inevitable consequence of obedience to the lawgiver of historians.” Quoted in Grafton, The Footnote, 196.

[22] Gilbert Burnet, A Letter Writ by the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, to the Lord Bishop of Coventry and Litchfield, Concerning a Book lately Published, Called A Specimen of Some Errors and Defects in the History of the Reformation of the Church of England, by Anthony Harmer (London: printed for Ric. Chilwell, 1693), 9.

[23] Wharton is an obscure figure, but not a totally unstudied one. The most complete account of his work can be found in David Douglas’s English Scholars, 1660-1730 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951).

[24] Wharton’s own life was dramatically impacted by the Revolution. On the day that William and Mary were proclaimed sovereigns, agents of the new regime were sent to Lambeth to demand recognition. Apparently the young Wharton, without consulting his boss Sancroft, “publicly prayed in the chapel for William and Mary.” Sancroft, who was a leader of the “Non-Juror” party of priests who refused to swear an oath to the new monarchs, was furious. Wharton himself became a non-juror, and struggled with this lapse of conscious for the remainder of his short life. Wharton died in 1695 at the age of 30. See Douglas, English Scholars, 152-53.

[25] Douglas, English Scholars, 139.

[26] “The majority [of Anglia Sacra] is still of importance to every serious student of English medieval antiquities... Before Wharton’s day, each chronicle tended to be regarded as a record in isolation ... Now, the whole monastic contribution to medieval chronicles began to be surveyed as a whole... Anglia Sacra thus brought together a collection of materials that might subserve a scientific history of the medieval Church in England.” Douglas, English Scholars, 146-47.

[27] Burnet, A Letter ... Concerning ... Anthony Harmer, 9.

[28] Indeed, Burnet emphasized that he received Wharton’s complaint “thirteen years ... past since I finished that work.” This distance between Wharton’s complaint and Burnet’s original publication made it so “now many of the things that I have writ are quite of my head,” and as such Burnet “decline[d] this ingrateful work, and shall only offer somewhat on the several heads on which he excises his Censure.” See A Letter ... Concerning ... Anthony Harmer, 14-15.

[29] This seems on par for Wharton, whose reputation for academic intensity included a penchant for doing all of his writing while standing up. His youth and ambition also help to explain his choice of anonymous publication when taking shots at a figure as dominant as Burnet.

[30] Anthony Harmer [aka Henry Wharton], A Specimen of some Errors and Defects in the History of the Reformation of the Church of England; Wrote by Gilbert Burnet, D.D., now Lord Bishop of Sarum (London: printed for Randall Taylor, 1693).

[31] “Burnet had included large appendices of unpublished records supplementing his historical veracity. Wharton insisted, on the contrary, that the collections were worthless because there ‘appears just reason to suspect the care and fidelity of the transcriber’. Wharton informed the reader ‘that of those which I have examined, I found near as many to be false as true’.Wharton examined Burnet’s work page by page, line by line, and word by word.” See J. A .I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: the Church of England and its Enemies, 1660-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 29. Note that Wharton himself was no angel when it came to perfection of transcription, the source materials republished in his Anglia Sacra “were often faulty and his texts sometimes unjustifiably abbreviated.” Douglas, English Scholars, 147.

[32] Harmer [aka Wharton], A Specimen of some Errors and Defects, 19.

[33] Burnet, A Letter ... Concerning ... Anthony Harmer, 10.

[34] Burnet, A Letter ... Concerning ... Anthony Harmer, 14-15.

[35] Robert B. Robinson, “The Two Institutes of Thomas Wood: A Study in Eighteenth Century Legal Scholarship,” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 35, no. 4 (1991), 433. Note that this Thomas Wood is different from (though related to) the elder Thomas Wood, who, extremely confusingly, happened to be the Bishop of Coventry and Litchfield until his death in 1692. His successor in that position, William Lloyd, was the recipient of Burnet’s 1693 A Letter ... Concerning ... Anthony Harmer.

[36] Thomas Wood, A vindication of the historiographer of the University of Oxford, and his works from the reproaches of the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, in his letter to the Lord Bishop of Coventry and Litchfield, concerning a book lately published, called, A specimen of some errors and defects in the history of the reformation of the Church of England, by Anthony Hurmer, written by E.D. ; to which is added the historiographer's answer to certain animadversions made in the before-mention'd History of the Reformation, to that part of Histroia & antiquitates Universitatis Oxon, which treats of the divorce of Queen Catherine from King Henry the Eighth (1693), 7.

[37] Thomas Wood, A Vindication of the Historiographer, 22.

[38] Gilbert Burnet, History of the Reformation vol. 1, 85-86. The relevant section of Anthony à Wood’s work can be found in Historia, et antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis (1674), 256.

[39] Thomas Wood, A Vindication of the Historiographer, 12.

[40] Thomas Wood, A Vindication of the Historiographer, 15-16.

[41] Thomas Wood, A Vindication of the Historiographer, 12. Obviously Thomas Wood was partial to Anthony Wood in this matter. That is simply a pedantic detail.

[42] Grafton, The Footnote, 199.

[43] Offering a full appraisal of Burnet’s “monumental history” is far beyond the scope of this paper. He also wrote another series, in addition to The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, called History of My Own Time (2 vols), which I have not even mentioned once. See also Gilbert’s son William, and his anonymously published An Essay on Scripture Prophecy, Wherein it is Endeavoured to Explain the three periods Contain'd in the XII Chapter of the Prophet Daniel With some Arguments to make it Probable that the FIRST of the PERIODS did Expire in the Year 1715 (1724).

[44] Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 34.

[45] Harmer [aka Wharton], A Specimen of some Errors and Defects, iii.

[46] Ibid, iii-iv.

[47] Thomas Wood, A Vindication of the Historiographer, 23.

[48] Anthony Wood, of course, was different: “The Truth is, which may be easily observed by any ordinary Reader (not prejudiced) that the Author of Athenae Oxon. hath written very impartially, and has related whatsoever he knows, whether good or bad, of those whose Lives he writes.” This is impartially is bred by two different things. First, institutional independence: “the Author, who never enjoyed any Place or Office [at the official university] or can justly say, that he hath Eaten the Bread of any Founder.” Second, a certain kind of social and physical lifestyle: “He is likewise so great an Admirer of a Solitary and Retired Life, that he frequents no Assemblies of the said University, hath no Companion in Bed, or at Board, in his Studies, Walks, or Journeys, nor holds Communication with any, unless with some, and those very few, of Generous and Noble Spirits...” Thomas Wood, Ibid, 20, 28-29. Naturally the foolproof secret ingredients for becoming an impartial historian belong in the paper’s final footnote.

~
~
~
~

On Origins

"The ancient theological problem of 'faith' and 'knowledge' - or, more clearly, of instinct and reason - in other words, the question whether regarding the valuation of things instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants us to evaluate and act in accordance with reasons, with a ‘why?' - in other words, in accordance with expedience and utility - this is still the ancient moral problem that first emerged in the person of Socrates and divided thinking people long before Christianity."

The 17th-century natural philosopher Robert Boyle maintained faith in revelation but thought it too dangerous to rely on in polite conversation (and the Royal Society was a site of polite conversation, first and foremost). In other words, rationality earned more authority than instinct not because it yielded more powerful answers but because it yielded safer answers, and by more consistent and reliable means. Eventually members of the Royal Society (already in the next generation after Boyle, the generation of Locke and Newton) either acquiesced to this preference for rationality completely or otherwise sublimated their instinct when speaking/writing in an official capacity.

Yet these rationalizations have their limits. "Just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its 'inventors.' All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows."

Socrates was told by Apollo (via the oracle at Delphi) to "know himself" because he was the wisest man. Diogenes was told by the same oracle something different: "deface the coins" - commit counterfeit. The first command is the command to reason (know thyself). The second command is the command to history (something different than instinct, I think). The command to history goes like this:

"Toward new philosophers; there is no choice; towards spirits strong and original enough to provide the stimuli for opposite valuations and to revalue and invert 'eternal values'; toward forerunners, toward people of the future who in the present tie the knot and constraint that forces the will of millennia upon new tracks."

Genealogy is the method of history, it is the question of the "origin of value and the value of origins." But what does Genealogy entail? I am going to quote a whole section here. It is section 12 of the Second Essay of the Genealogy of Morals. It cites Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley by name. It is equal parts powerful and dangerous. I am still working on squaring it. If you don't want to read the whole section just skip to the last paragraph where he mentions Spencer and Huxley.

My question is: did Darwin think evolution was a Progressus?

"Yet a word on the origin and the purpose of punishment - two problems that are separate, or ought to be separate: unfortunately they are usually confounded. How have previous genealogists of morals set about solving these problems? Naively, as has always been their way: they seek out some 'purpose' in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then guilelessly place this purpose at the beginning as causa fiendi of punishment and - have done. The 'purpose of the law,' however, is absolutely the last thing to employ in the history of the origin of law: on the contrary, there is for historiography of any kind no more important proposition than the one it took such effort to establish but which really ought to be established now: the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous 'meaning' and 'purpose' are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However well one has understood the utility of any physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form in art or in a religious cult), this means nothing regarding its origin: however uncomfortable and disagreeable this may sound to older ears - for one had always believed that to understand the demonstrable purpose, the utility of a thing, a form, or an institution, was also to understand the reason why it originated - the eye being made for seeing, the hand being made for grasping.

Thus one also imagined that punishment was devised for punishing. But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a 'thing,' an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion. The 'evolution' of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of force - but a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. The form is fluid, but the 'meaning' is even more so.

The case is the same even within each individual organism: with every real growth in the whole, the 'meaning' of the individual organs also changes; in certain circumstances their partial destruction, a reduction in their numbers (for example, through the disappearance of intermediary members) can be a sign of increasing strength and perfection. It is not too much to say that even a partial diminution of utility, an atrophying and degeneration, a loss of meaning and purposiveness - in short, death - is among the conditions of an actual progressus, which always appears in the shape of a will and way to greater power and is always carried through at the expense of numerous smaller powers. The magnitude of an 'advance' can even be measured by the mass of things that had to be sacrificed to it; mankind in the mass sacrificed to the prosperity of a single stronger species of man - that would be an advance.

I emphasize this major point of historical method all the more because it is in fundamental opposition to the now prevalent instinct and taste which would rather be reconciled even to the absolute fortuitousness, even the mechanistic senselessness of all events than to the theory that in all events a will to power is operating. The democratic idiosyncrasy which opposes everything that dominates and wants to dominate, the modern misarchism (to coin an ugly word for an ugly thing) has permeated the realm of the spirit and disguised itself in the most spiritual forms to such a degree that today it has forced its way, has acquired the right to force its way into the strictest, apparently most objective sciences; indeed, it seems to me to have already taken charge of all physiology and theory of life - to the detriment of life, as goes without saying since it has robbed it of a fundamental concept, that of activity. Under the influence of the above-mentioned idiosyncrasy, one places instead 'adaptation' in the foreground, that is to say, an activity of the second rank, a mere reactivity; indeed, life itself has been defined as a more and more efficient inner adaptation to external conditions (Herbert Spencer). Thus the essence of life, its will to power, is ignored; one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions, although 'adaptation' follows only after this; the dominant role of the highest functionaries within the organism itself in which the will to life appears active and form-giving is denied. One should recall what Huxley reproached Spencer with - his 'administrative nihilism': but it is a question of rather more than mere 'administration.'" -FN

A final note: Nietzsche signed the last chapter of Ecce Homo (titled "why I am a destiny") as "Dionysus versus the Crucified." I don't like this word "versus" (competition is a form of reactivity, Nietzsche should know better) and I am certainly no Dionysian. But despite both of these misgivings I appreciate this gesture when it comes to the philosophers. They could benefit from removing their nails, it might let them look around a bit more.

TO THE DARWINIAN

A fool this honest Britisher
Was not ... But a Philosopher!
As that you really rate him?
Set Darwin up by Goethe's side?
But majesty you thus deride—
Genii majestatem!

Paul Klee, "One Who Understands," 1934