Transferred from: Phoenix Network Culture
Philosophical Garden acknowledges
Lead
Part 01
Young people no longer read, or only read abstracts and cartoons
Adler: Do you think books and reading will be in danger in the future?
Steiner: Readers are always there. Even during the medieval "barbarian" invasion, the monastery became a sanctuary, and people still read there. We can't know exactly how many monks were literate, but there were always some who could read. However, there are very few people who can write, almost none.
However, becoming a "literati" is very insecure. The Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment and the 19th century were their highlights, their golden ages. Private libraries – we can think of Montaigne, Erasmus or Montesquieu – became a very rare luxury. Today's living rooms no longer allow for large-scale book collections. That's an exceptional state. Today, in Britain, small bookstores are closing down like a nightmare. In Italy, a country I like, from Milan to Bari in the south, there are only newsstands and no serious bookstores along the way. In Italy, people don't read. In the countryside of Spain and Portugal, people rarely read. In areas ruled by Catholics, reading was never popular.
Reading is a form of high bourgeois—a dangerous word to use. In some eras, the idea of reading, education through reading, has developed rapidly and created many miracles.
Today, someone said to me, "Young people don't read anymore" or read only digests or comics. Our exams, even those of universities, are increasingly based on selected texts, anthologies or works that have won abstract awards. The word "Reader's Digest" that has spread all over the world is very frightening. The "Digest Award" has also been established. It was food that someone else had chewed and digested. As a courtesy, let's not talk about what exit it is discharged through, right? Well, I'm talking too vulgarly.
Reading requires some specific prerequisites. This is not sufficiently noticed. First of all, it requires a very quiet environment. Silence has become the most expensive and extravagant thing in the world. In our cities (in cities that run twenty-four hours a day, such as New York, Chicago or London, where nightlife is no different from daytime), quiet is just as expensive as gold.
I'm not attacking the United States. My children live there, and so do my grandchildren. This is the future of humanity, alas! I'm not attacking. Their statistics are more reliable than ours. What do their latest statistics show? 85% of teens can't read without listening to music, creating what psychologists call a "flicker effect," similar to the effect of glowsticks: When we want to read, the television sets are playing in the corners of the field of view. No one can read serious texts in this situation. Only in the quietest possible environment can one read a page of Pascal, Baudelaire, Proust, or any other writer you want to read.
The second condition: there must be a private space. There should be a room in the house, even if it is a small room, as long as we can live with the book, as long as we can talk to the book without anyone else. Speaking of which, we touch on a topic that is rarely truly understood. The beauty of music is that it can be shared with others. You can listen to music with a group of people, and you can listen to music with your loved ones and friends. Music is a language of sharing, but reading is not. Of course, we can read aloud, and more should be encouraged now. We don't read aloud for children anymore, which is a shameful thing, and the situation for adults is even worse! 19th-century literature is often written for reading, and I can give you an example: the whole page of Balzac, Hugo, Georges San, their rhythms and structural rhythms are extremely easy to recite, to listen to, to understand. Fortunately, my father read it to me before I understood it (it was a secret) and could not fully grasp it.
George Steiner
So, quiet environments, private spaces are important, and the third point I'm going to make next is very elitist (I like the word "elite", it just indicates that some things are better than others, nothing else): owning a book. Large public libraries were the foundation of education and culture in the 19th century, and they had the same meaning to the psyche of the 20th century. But it's important to have your own collection of books and to be the owner of the books without having to borrow them. Why? Because you have to hold a pencil when you read.
Adler: I feel like you divide people into two kinds: those who read with a pen and those who don't.
STEINER: Exactly. I repeat: we can almost define Jews as "people who always hold a pen when they read." Because he firmly believed that he would write a better book than the one he was reading. This is a great cultural arrogance of our little tragic people.
Take notes, draw key points, compete with the text, and write at the edges of the page: "How stupid! What a thought! "There's nothing more interesting than the notes written on the side pages of a big writer, which are all vivid conversations. Erasmus once said, "You don't read a book without breaking it." "It's a bit extreme, but it also contains great truths. Having a complete collection of a writer's work, like having a guest in the house, we both thank him and forgive him for his shortcomings, and even fall in love with them. After a few years, we try to hide the traces of our misreading or interpretation with a certain authoritative arrogance. But this is the stupidest!
The lessons learned from books are the most dangerous and fascinating. Sure, books can rot, but it's just a joke that's inconvenient to tell publicly. There are sadists, political cruelty, and racist abetments. Because I believe God is Kafka's uncle (and I am convinced of this), He will not give us a simple life.
Part 02
English is like a flying carpet to tomorrow
Adler: How do you see the dominance of Anglo-American language and culture in the world? What do you think of the situation in The French language?
Steiner: A language is a way of saying things, it's as simple as that. The future tense of verbs in each language—and in some languages, the will—varies. Expectations of the potential of human exploration and the human condition also vary by language. Its richness is like a memory, like a huge whole of memories. If our planet were to become monolingual, or nearly monolingual, it would be no less than the loss of the extinction of plant and animal species (you should know that they have been wiped out around the world) and an appalling impoverishment. I don't seem to need to tell you how worrying the situation of the French language itself is in the face of the conquest of the Anglo-American language.
That is to say, the triumph of this language, oh, ironically, the triumph of this industrial, technical, scientific, economic, financial Esperanto, is closely linked to the political power of the United States. The English-American language, in a way that is difficult to explain clearly, is full of hope and commitment, while the other great languages are in a state of fatigue and apparent sentimentality. What a material worth studying! Some languages have been crushed by dominance on the American continent, but others are generating new vitality. The powerful writers of Latin America warmed up on Spanish soil and spread their influence at an astonishing rate. The Portuguese language, once used by Saramago and Antonio Lobo Antunes (who, in my opinion, is one of the finest European writers) is gaining its edge in Brazil, which has its own dazzling literary tradition. Other languages are not optimistic.
In Britain, the fate of the English language is unclear, because for young people, it is actually an Anglo-American culture that prevails. Martin Amis, who was the most promising novelist of his generation as a young man, wrote a novel titled Money, shaping this new beauty Chinese with unparalleled talent. But it wasn't a big seller at the time.
The narrow strait between France and England was, in a sense, wider than the Pacific Ocean. Bounded by it, there are profound differences between the two languages, the two ways of seeing the world. On the one hand, there was a doctrine called moralism that was once popular in France, and it may be in decline now, but there will always be a day when it will return. We must not forget that Britain is in a paradox: the island is in economic and political decline, it has been battered by wars it has not won or won unexpectedly, but its language has ruled the globe. The island came out of the English used by Shakespeare and the whole world. I have left traces in many places, and I can always hear English everywhere I go, whether in China, with Japanese students, or in Eastern Europe.
Valery is my idol, but he's also said some wonderful stupid things. He once claimed: "Some people say that it only takes twenty hours to learn English. My answer was that twenty thousand hours of learning French was not enough. ”
Paul Valery (30.10.1871 – 20.7.1945) was a French Symbolist poet and a member of the Académie française. He is the author of "Old Poetry Manuscripts" (1890-1900), "The Young Goddess of Destiny" (1917), "The Collection of Illusions" (1922) and so on.
I've taught both languages, and he's right: English is not only learnable quickly, but it contains a message of hope. What does that mean? English is like a flying carpet to tomorrow. The English language is full of commitment. It says to us, "Tomorrow will be better." There is a famous phrase in the American Declaration of Independence: "The pursuit of happiness." It's like declaring to the whole of humanity, "Go for happiness!" "But this is by no means self-evident. There is no great despair in this language, no sense of doom in Russian or French, no metaphysical vision of humanity, of original sin. The Anglo-American language never believed this.
Adler: You don't seem to have a computer in your house.
Steiner: I'm a tech blind, the kind that screams when I hit tech. I couldn't even figure out how the phone worked. However, I suspect you don't understand it either. People nowadays have an unbelievable bluff. We're surrounded by devices that we don't know anything about. Kindle, iPod, Twitter. I know they exist because my grandchildren are good at manipulating these magic tricks. Everything depends on the English and American language, on the economics of speech and on the economics of syntax. We need to be careful. If the computer and its first languages (thanks to The American Shannon and the British Turing) had been invented in India, if the original information writing program had been built on Indian grammar, the world would have been different.
The planet will no longer be what we know it now. There is a surprising coincidence between the new idea of minimalist discourse and the innate structure of the Anglo-American language. Why does the German language drive people crazy and translate everything into philosophy? Because German verbs tend to appear at the end of endless long sentences. That is, we hesitate, we keep starting over, we say "or, or, or" to ourselves, and eventually we don't find that verb. This led to the styles of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant and Heidegger. English can't do that.
The English language is addressed to the masses, not to the illiterate or uneducated—crude words like this should be discarded—but to those who are not privileged in the face of language. It says to them, "You can do it too, you can get everything you want." "It gives a huge promise: it can also be eloquent in simple language.
Note that in many countries, such as France, if you make grammatical mistakes, if you make a slip of the tongue, if you don't speak coherently, you will be treated differently. In the United States, we associate a lack of eloquence with honesty: a man who says something bad proves that he is honest, that he does not run a train with his mouth full. The profundity of this logic is comparable to that of dialectics, like a counter-theme of Roman and French civilization. In France, one must know how to speak, and important French leaders often have amazing eloquence. France gave birth to a Boschère, a de Gaulle, and other orators. In the United States, the most basic vocabulary is only about eight hundred. Bell Telephone Company has studied that it only takes eighty words to say everything we want to say. In other languages, an extremely rich vocabulary can distinguish between a certain social elite and an educational elite. The situation is very different.
Part 03
Women lack creativity because of their fertility?
Adler: If you cite another part of your lesser-known study, which is the problem of the lust of discourse, you can see that speech also depends on gender. What is the lust of words? What does it deliver? You boldly claim that there is a kind of feminine speech.
Steiner: I'm becoming more and more confident in this question, and it's really a mineral-rich topic. In northern Siberia, in the Altaic language family, including in Southeast Asia, some languages distinguish between discourses applicable to women and men. This means that women are not entitled to certain syntactic forms. And those male words are what they must master in order to pass them on to their sons. This ironically reflects the injustices suffered by women, but this injustice is truly crystallized and anchored in the form of language.
For thousands of years in the history of the English language, women have only spoken to women. They cannot intervene in men's political, social, and theological discussions. Women at that time had to develop the habit of quoting, using codes, and understanding others, and these organic habits were internalized into their attributes. It wasn't until recently that women engaged in general discourse.
I've experienced Britain like this, in Cambridge or Oxford, where women have to leave their table and sit in another room after dessert. Men gathered together to talk about politics and "getting things done." Thankfully, this absurd custom has now waned. But think about it, some colleges in Oxford and Cambridge — and this is less and less the case — that at major gala dinners, men in evening gowns sit around long tables on high platforms, while women linger in the corridors. This is also the case with the synagogue, and I often make fun of them about it.
There is no doubt that the female discourse is deeply rooted in the experience of women with children , an experience that men cannot fully appreciate — and the experience of sex. Don juanisme in discourse has long been studied. Women have a lot of say in this (I've heard of a woman who uses sex in a language other than her own). This thing also belongs to another planet.
Fiction has largely become a territory exclusive to women. The novel was directed by women. Specifically, the novel itself is a multilingual form that expresses the hierarchy of different discourses and vocabulary. Virginia Woolf was acutely aware of and explored this. Important contemporary female novelists have also perceived the incomprehensibility caused by gender differences; there is always one side that is obscure. At the end of the day, it's hard for us to understand each other. Those idiotic and vulgar jokes, such as "When a woman says no, she means she wants", all have a basis in semiotics (a word that may not be appropriate, but it can't be found better), a real and profound foundation.
In fact, most of the moments in verbal communication are— there's a saying in French— "the conversation of the deaf." A lot of men have a boyish lust ("nobody understands me"), a deep resentment of increasingly assertive feminine discourse. Who would have predicted that the two parties that would end up deciding the race would be two strong women— Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice? Their charm is far superior to that of the poor male candidates. The situation is similar in other countries, where the advancement of women promotes the emancipation of political discourse and new sociological discourse. oh! That would be a great adventure.
I firmly believe that great art offers many remedies for suffering or injustice. This begs the extremely tricky question: Why can't women create more?
Adler: Because men don't allow them to do that.
STEINER: No! No one stopped Pascal's sister from creating. She had studied mathematics, but not her, but her brother Pascal, who had rediscovered all of Euclid's theorem at the age of nine. No, no, the situation is much more complicated. Today, there are some outstanding novelists in england and France. The women's movement will only make this group bigger and bigger. As for poetry, alas, there are indeed fewer female poets. But there are two that we have to admire: Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.
I have a silly assumption: if we can create life and give birth to a child, aesthetic, moral, and philosophical creations are likely to be insignificant. But only hypothetical. Some women may be furious when they hear it, and it is reasonable that they do not accept such arguments. Will there be great women in the coming generations? This is still unknown in the field of science. Cambridge recruits talented young women in all schools. The project was supported by the government, which awarded them scholarships... I must agree with such initiatives, after all, their situation is still more difficult than that of boys.
Adler: Women are lucky in your country because our French girls tend to have to pull aside.
Steiner: We're also trying, keeping to figure it out.
Adler: The British are significantly more feminist than the French.
Steiner: They did a great job when they first started school, and then they started to slide, and they don't know why. This is an exciting topic, and it reminds us once again that the theoretical tools of social and collective psychology are still very rudimentary. A set of tools that are still very rudimentary. What exactly did we learn from Master Durkheim? Where do the embryos and viruses that create—which means "I'm going to change the world"—originate? Maybe the reason is that women have too much common sense? Whatever Descartes said, common sense was not assigned to where it was supposed to go. Common sense is indeed the enemy of talent. Common sense weakens irrationality and arrogance.
Adler: George! You're machismo!
Steiner: No, I just respect the facts. I'm still waiting for a turnaround. Wait for the transfer.
Adler: You're still waiting, but we all had great female creators then and now. Well — and I might upset you with what I'm saying below — you said that women aren't creative because they have the ability to have children, which prevents them from becoming creators; to re-examine your hypothesis, I'm going to mention three female philosophers. Coincidentally, none of them had children, is this a coincidence or a necessity? Either way, they don't want to have children. I am referring to Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Vee. What do you have to say about that?
Steiner: I can't accept your judgment. Unfortunately, I met Hannah Arendt... I think there are very few works that she can call first-class. A woman who wrote a generous book on the origins of totalitarianism did not say anything about Stalin because her husband was a true communist-Stalinist? No, thanks.
Hannah Arendt
Simone Weil? General de Gaulle said, "She's crazy! "It's hard to argue with this assertion. Some of the things she wrote were pretty good...
Adler: But you often read Simone Weil...
Steiner: She wrote some great stuff, but very few of them. Well, forgive me for my blind and shallow prejudices. A woman who refused to enter the Catholic Church during the Auschwitz period said that her Jewish blood was too pure? No, thanks. This is unforgivable! If the last judgment comes, this lady's life will be difficult. Third, who are you talking about?
Adler: Simone de Beauvoir.
STEINER: Amazing women. How fortunate she was to be with Mr. Sartre... What a blessing! What a wise choice...
Adler: I think Jean-Paul Sartre was very lucky.
Steiner: It's entirely possible... Of course, I admire her very much. People who don't like her certainly have too. But why aren't more women seen in sciences with more open opportunities (the United States is very active in motivating women)? What a Nobel Prize jury is all macho with prejudice... No, that's not a compelling reason. We've been looking for women at the cutting edge of science, and we've been searching for women winners for the Fields Medal , the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics . Some colleagues told me that it was really puzzling. Things are likely to improve in the future.
This article is excerpted from
The Long Saturday
Author: [American] George Steiner / [french] Lohr Adler
Publisher: Guangxi Normal University Press
Producer: Xinmin said
Subtitle: Steiner Talk
Translator: Qin Sanshu / Wang Zitong
Publication year: 2020-9