8/6/2019 Grounds for ion

1/5

University of Oklahoma

Grounds of ComparisonAuthor(s): Claudia Brodsky LacourSource: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Comparative Literature: States of the Art(Spring, 1995), pp. 271-274Published by: University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151135

Accessed: 23/12/2009 01:31

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=univokla.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Oklahoma is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World

Literature Today.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151135?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=univoklahttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=univoklahttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/40151135?origin=JSTOR-pdf

8/6/2019 Grounds for ion

2/5

Groundsof ComparisonBy CLAUDIABRODSKYLACOUR"Ce n'est que par une comparaisonque nousconnaissonsprecisement a verite. . . . Toute con-naissancequi ne s'obtientpas parrintuitionsimpleet pure d'une chose isolee, s'obtientpar la compa-raison de deux ou plusieurschoses entre elles. Etpresque out le travailde la raisonhumaine consistesans doute a rendre cette operationpossible"1 It isonly by way of comparison hat we know the truthprecisely. . . All knowledgewhich is not obtainedthrough he simpleandpureintuition of an isolatedthingis obtainedby the comparisonof two or morethings amongthemselves.And almost all the workof human reason consists withoutdoubt in makingthis operation possible). In the terms of "humanreason" first laid down by Descartes, knowledgethat is not intuitionaldepends upon acts of compar-ison. Comparison operateswhenever "an isolatedthing" s not the objectof knowledge,and theoreti-cal reflection,rather han "pureand simple"appre-hension, offers the only approach to knowledgepossible. Although its reception by idealistneo-Cartesians uch as Malbranche ed to the his-torical associationof Cartesianismwith divine intu-itionalism,Descartes'smodernization f philosophi-cal discourse and scientific procedures centeredupon the notion of a man-made"method,"an or-dered, essentially comparativemode. Never fullydefinedby Descartes,method nonethelessappearsthroughouthis theoretical writings as the singlemeansrigorousenoughto investigate he real, littleof which as the famous exercises n skepticismofthe Meditations emonstrated is perceivedby us inintuitable orm.2The only "thing"we may intuitdirectly,accord-ing to Descartes, is spatialextension;for all otherthings, ncluding"thethinking hing" hatis the selfand "the infinite substance" that is God, Des-cartes'stheory prescribes he method of compari-son.3 If, following Descartes, the fundamentallynonintuitional,made "things" hat are literaryandother cultural ormsfirstbecomeknownto us not inthemselvesbut by way of comparison, he problem

Descartes confrontedwhen he theorized he neces-sity of comparing n the Discours nd Regulaenowconfrontscontemporaryiterary heorythat under-stands the "workof reason"to be, for good or forill, inherentlycomparative:on what basis do wemakecomparisonsn thehumanities?In order to understandwhy comparative heorydesignedto advance heoreticalcertaintynow raisesinstead what seem like inevitabledoubts,one mustfirstexamine the shiftingcourseof the comparativemethod since Descartes. Inquiry nto the develop-ment of moderncomparativeheoryrevealsa histo-ry of disciplinary xchanges.The cognitivevalue at-tributed to comparison in the humanitieswouldseem to owe most immediately o nineteenth-centu-ry developments n the naturaland social sciences,fields such as ethnography, ociology, psychology,lingustics, political economy, evolutionarybiology,anatomy, and paleontology,some of which cameinto being with the descriptive,comparativemeth-ods they employed.In the comparative hilologyofBopp and Humboldtand, a centurylater, Propp'sMorphology of the Folktale (1928), the methods ofcomparative nalysishoned in empirical ieldsweretransposedto the realms of grammarand shapedcultural phenomena, and a nonnaturalbasis forcomparisoncame to the fore. Yet, by the secondhalfof the twentiethcentury,within a generationofthe Czech and Russian formalists, comparativeanalyses of culturalphenomena turned back intonaturalist anatomies: the narratologicalproject ofapplyingmethods of structural honeticandsyntac-tic analysisto the languageof literature aimed atestablishinga "science" n imitation of taxonomicnatural sciences proved a nightmareof vacuouscategorization rom which it took neither BarthesnorTodorovlong to awake.If the patternsof natur-al morphologywere irrelevant o linguisticmorphol-ogy, the scientistic classificationof literaryformswasdoublyso, an antiliterary, aturalistmythology.Universalist cientisticanatomieshad at least thepotentialsalutary ffect(borrowedrom structuralistanthropology) f wideningthe focus of the humani-ties beyond predefinedcanons. Subsequentcriti-cism of scientisticand traditionalhumanistcompar-ativeprojectshas, however,questioned he value ofcomparingculturalphenomenain the first place.While takingthe need for theoreticalreflectionforgranted, skepticismin the late twentieth centurydoubts whether comparisons should or can bevalue-neutral,whethercognitivevalue is not itself amythdeterminedby an epistemically efinedcultur-

Claudia Brodsky Lacour teachescomparativeiteratureandtheoryat PrincetonUniversity.She is the authorof TheImposi-tion of Form: Studies in Narrative Representationand Knowledge(1987), a studyof Kant'sepistemologyand fictional orm;nu-merous articleson English,German,and French literature ndphilosophyrom the eighteenth entury o the present;and Linesof Thought:Discourse,Architectonics, nd the Origin of ModernPhi-losophyforthcoming), studyof Descartes.

8/6/2019 Grounds for ion

3/5

272 WORLDLITERATURE ODAYal context,and,in a late reenactment nd reversalofthe neoclassical querelledes anciens et des rnodernes,whetherthe comparativepursuit of knowledgeinthe name of progressdoes not fundamentally istortthe objectswhose effects t pretends o explain.What is suspectedin skepticismof all compara-tive projects, arising preciselywith the "postmod-ern"proliferationof differentulturaltraditions, sthatcomparison,understoodas the identificationofsimilarityn difference,will efface difference n a de-sire for unity, either self-servinglyor by a weakHegelianism hat absorbsdifferenceas the necessaryballast to transcendentthought. The nonnaturalgroundsof comparison hat areparticularo the hu-manities nvolve a necessary ension between unityand difference hat "neutral" lassificationor syn-thetic resolution must work to efface. Dialecticaland scientistic schemes which employ the conceptof differenceas a meansto an end negatethe inter-play of opposing purposeswhich objectsin the hu-manitiesrepresent.The productive tension that characterizes hemade "things"of the human sciences was the ex-plicit groundof comparison n one of the most ex-tensive bodies of earlymodernwritingon "naturalscience."Goethe'slifelongcompositionof a "com-parativemorphology" n the domains of botany,anatomy, osteology, mineralogy,and geology (ZurMorphologie,1817-24; Zur Naturwissenschaft,1820-23), largelywritten n responseto the new descrip-tive projects of Cuvier, Buffon, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Linne, alreadybetrays the equivocalattractionowarddifferenceandunitydemonstratedin contemporary omparative heory and the ten-dencyto exchangenatural orculturalbases of com-parisonwhich such equivocationentails. From theoutset, Goethe declaredthe centralityof compari-son to the study of naturalphenomena.His early"Allgemeine Einleitung in die vergleichendeAnatomie,ausgehendvon der Osteologie" GeneralIntroductionto ComparativeAnatomy, Based onOsteology;1793) openswith the following heoreti-cal claim: "Naturgeschichteberuht auf Verglei-chung. AufiereKennzeichensind bedeutend, abernichthinreichend,um organischeKorpergehorigzusondern und wiederzusammenzustellen"4Naturalhistoryrests on comparison.Externalcharacteristicsare significant,but not sufficient for the task ofproperly eparating rganicbodies andjoining hemback together again).That comparisoncould indi-cate the underlying"continuity"5f naturalhistorywhich isolatedcharacteristics elie was the guidingprinciplebehind Goethe's celebrated dentificationof the os intermaxillarer "Zwischenknochenderobern Kinlade" (intermediaryupper-jawbone) inhuman anatomy,the "smalldiscovery,"as Goethecalled t, of the missing ink in the naturalhistoryre-latingapesto men.6

Goethe's rhetoricof understatementegarding isfinding only served o underscorewhat he perceivedto be the enormity of its historical significance:"LangeZeit wollte sich der UnterschiedzwischenMenschen und Tieren nicht finden lassen, endlichglaubte man den Affen dadurch entschieden vonuns zu trennen,weil er seine vier Schneidezahneneinem empirischwirklichabzusonderndenKnochentrage"7Fora long time the differencebetween menand animals could not be found, and finally t wasbelievedthat the apecould be differentiatedrom usin that its incisors were located in a bone that wasreally empiricallydistinguishable).By transformingthe appearanceof a differentiatingcharacteristicinto evidence of a single feature,his comparativestudy, Goethe argues, should eradicateany future"doubts"about the shared raits(and, by inference,the common genealogy) of human and animalanatomy:"Es wird also wohl kein Zweifel iibrig-bleiben, dafi diese Knochenabteilung ich sowohlbei Menschen als Tieren findet"8 There will thusno longerremainany doubt that this classificationof bone is to be found in man as well as in animals).A discoveryof this nature, Goethe remarks,re-quires ittle discursiventroduction,or it is availableto anyonewho both "looks and compares."9Com-parison s the indispensable omplement o empiri-cal vision, and if the search for part of a jawbonestrikesus as a less than inspiringcomparativepro-ject, the stakes nvolved n it should not. By compar-ingvisible characteristics nd thus seeingwhat couldnot be perceived n isolation,Goethe overturnedheanthropocentric iew of nature that had precludedthe recognitionof continuityby assertingdifferencemerelyout of fear of the same.Yet Goethe makes the case for the comparativemethodfromthe vantagepointof differenceas well,writingof distantplant types in his botanical stud-ies: "Die allerentferntestenedoch haben eine aus-gesprocheneVerwandtschaft, ie lassen sich ohneZwang untereinandervergleichen"10The furthestaparthave, nonetheless,a pronouncedrelationship;they can be comparedamong each other withoutforcing the comparison).What permitsGoethe asnatural cientist o compareunlike no less thanlike,finding "pronounced elationships]" if not empiri-cal missing links, is his dynamic"view" of a "na-ture" directed at once by what he calls "twogreatdrivingwheels"("dieAnschauungder zwei grofienTriebraderderNatur"): polarity""Polaritat")nd"intensification" r "rising" "Steigerung"),he for-mer signifying he "unendingattractionand repul-sion" ("immerwahrendemAnziehen und Absto-fien")or alternatingendencies toward dentityanddifference hat takeplace in "matter,"he lattersig-nifyingthe "permanent trivingtowardgreater n-tensity" ("immerstrebendem ufsteigen")of "spir-it."11And what makes these two tendencies truly

8/6/2019 Grounds for ion

4/5

LACOUR 273dynamic n a Goethean(rather hanHegelian)senseis that they themselvescan be exchanged:just asmatterand spiritcan never"existand be effective"("existiertund wirksamsein") without each other,so matter oo, according o Goethe, increases n in-tensity and spirit engages in separationsand join-ings.12Always "mobile,"Goethe's nature is, however,not anaimless,Lucretiandance of forms.13 he pur-posivenessof the apparently nti-Cartesianonjunc-tion of matter and spirit14 e describes is perhapsbest exempified in his recorded search for the"Urpflanze," he descriptionof which memorablycaused Schiller o comment that Goethesoughtnota plant"but an idea."15 oethe'scomparativeheoryof naturalphenomemadid indeed allow for a theoryof identity in a realm of ideas: in experienceallthings appeareither "similar"or "dissimilar""alsahnlich,ja sogarals vollig unahnlich"),but "in theidea,"Goethe writes,they are "the same" ("in derIdee gleich").16Whetheror not Schiller's"idea"re-sembled Goethe's (let alone his notion of a proto-typicalplant),one of Goethe'sgroundsof compari-son seems to be a vision of things in whichtemporary differences between appearances areerasedand the drives of matterand spiritare sus-pended.Yet Goethethe writerof naturalscience was alsoGoethe the writer,and it should be evident that thenaturewhosethingsGoethecompares s less materi-alist,or idealist, hanit is literaryn conception.17 sa maker of fictions, Goethe alreadyknew no othermethod than comparison.If his comparativeap-proachto naturewas based upon the notion of anever-intensifying olarityof forces, and his under-standingof the materializations f those forces im-plied an "idea"of material orm,the model for thatapproachwas a medium that comes into existencewith comparison.Fictions, and other artifacts,areforms whose "things" words,or any othersignsare,by nature,comparative.The differencesamongthesethingsyield "pronounced elationships],"andwhat unitesthem also separates. n fictionno thingsexist in isolation, and there are no "intuitions"ofisolated things; all things are part of an artificialcontinuity,and one makes the knowledgeone de-rives from them. Yet thatknowledge, orbeing arti-ficial and comparative,allows of less doubt than"natural" erceptions if one conceives of nature na purelyempirical,non-Goethean,and noncompar-ative sense.No one approached he knowledgeof nature inless purelyempirical erms than Descartes. In thecourse of doubtingnaturalperceptions,Descartesdevelopeda theoryof comparison.But in ordertoeffect comparisons, Descartes had to develop amediumin which the method of comparisoncouldtake place, a medium, that is, which would make

knowledgeof naturepossiblebecause t was notnat-ural. We now speak of Cartesiancoordinates,andpolynomialequationswritten in ordershigherthanthree,because for spatialextensions,the basic unitof the physical world, and even for the numberswhich identify and distinguish them by length,Descartessubstituted etters purelydifferential, r-tificial hings.18These "veryconcise signs"("dessignestres con-cis"), Descartesobserved,can be made as one likes("queTonpeut forgercomme on voudra").19hingsmade for the purpose of their comparison, theyallow the intellect to act in the mannerof Goethe'snature, to draw from otherwise disconnected ele-ments "a kind of continuousmovementof thought"("unesorte de mouvementcontinu de la pensee").20Continuityof thought replaces he doubtfulpercep-tion of things with links of similarityand relation-ships of difference,creating out of the empiricalworld for which signs substitute a kind of naturalhistoryof thinking.Descartes'smethod for achievingknowledgepro-vides the mind with the means of making compar-isons, and those means,the groundsof comparison,are neither inherent in nor external to the thingscompared. f one compares hese two different om-parative heories and procedures Descartes'ssub-stitution of freelychosensignsforsimpleextensionsin space, and Goethe's detailed nvestigationof thecharacteristicsof empirical objects their groundsand methods of comparisonproveto be equallyun-questionable,due to the very fact that, in bothcases,theyare not givenbut made.Just as their theoriesof comparisonmake thesesciencesappearnot so verynaturalafterall, humansciences suffer from a misplacednaturalismwhenthey judge the value of comparison in positiveterms, forgettingthat what they are comparing sformed of the activityof comparison o beginwith.But it may be characteristic f the activityof com-parisonthat, in comparing hingswith otherthingsthey are not, it also lends itself to exchanging actfor fiction, fiction for fact. This would explainnotonly the disciplinary xchanges hat mark he histo-ry of comparative heory,but also the way in whichthe human sciences can prove oddly skepticalofcomparison.Such skepticismmay be an enlighten-ing form of self-criticism,or it maybe an inevitablefiction,partof the verypracticeof comparisontself.PrincetonUniversity

1Rene Descartes,Regulae d directionemngenii,RuleXIV, inhis CEuvreshilosophiques,vols., ed. FerdinandAlquie,Paris,Gamier, 1963,vol. 1,p. 168. Alltranslations remyown.2As definedby Descartes,even intuitionsare not immediatecognitionsbut, rather,representations:Par ntuition'entends,nonpointle temoinagenstabledes sens . . . , mais unerepresen-tation qui est le fait de l'intelligencepure et attentive,. . .representationnaccessibleau doute"(By intuition understand

8/6/2019 Grounds for ion

5/5

274 WORLD LITERATURE TODAYnot the unstable testimony of the senses . . . , but a representa-tion which is the creation of a pure and attentive intelligence, . . .which is inaccessible to doubt). Regulae,Rule III, vol. 1, p. 87.3Descartes, Meditations, in his CEuvres hilosophiquess ol. 2,pp. 445, 449-50. Cf. also part 1, chapter 4, "The Things aThinking Thing Thinks," in my Lines of Thought:Discourse,Ar-chitectonics, nd the Origin of ModernPhilosophy, orthcoming fromDuke University Press and L'Harmattan in Paris.4Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke:HamburgerAusgabe, 14vols., Munich, DTV, 1982, vol. 13, p. 170.5Ibid., vol. 13, pp. 546-47, 553, 560.6Goethe, "Dem Menschen wie den Tieren ist ein Zwischen-knochen der obern Kinnlade zuzuschreiben" [An IntermediaryUpper-Jaw Bone Is to Be Ascribed to Men as Well as to Ani-mals], Werke,vol. 13, p. 184.7Goethe, ZurMorphologie1817), Werke,vol. 13, p. 62.8Goethe, "Dem Menschen wie den Tieren...," p. 194.9Ibid., p. 185: "Ich will mich so kurz als moglich fassen, weildurch blofies Anschauen und Vergleichen mehrerer Schadel eineohnedies sehr einfache Behauptung geschwinde beurteilet wer-den kann" (I will be brief in my remarks, because a claim that isin any case very simple can be quickly judged by the mere look-ing at and comparing of several skulls).10Goethe, "Geschichte meiner botanischen Studien," Werke,vol. 13, p. 163.11Goethe, "Erlauterung zu dem aphoristischen Aufsatz 'DieNatur'," Werke,vol. 13, p. 48.

12Ibid.13On the changing polarity of appearances, Goethe writes inZur Morphologie,p. 57: "Darin besteht eigentlich das beweglicheLeben der Natur" (Therein actually lies the mobile life of na-ture).14Cf. Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, "Einige Begriffe ausGoethes Naturwissenschaft," Werke,vol. 13, p. 550.15Ibid., p. 544. Cf. my "Freedom in Kant and Schiller," inFriedrich von Schiller and the Drama of Human Existence:SelectedPapers rom the Friedrichvon SchillerConference,"Contributions tothe Study of World Literature," no. 25, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky,New York, Greenwood, 1988, p. 132.16Goethe, ZurMorphologie,p. 57.17Of note in this regard is the presence of Kant and Schillerand the telling absence of Goethe in a recent volume of essays byhumanists tracing the intellectual evolution of the separationofthe natural and human sciences: Die Trennungvon Natur undGeist, eds. Rudiger Bubner, Burkhard Gladigow, and WalterHaug, Munich, Fink, 1990. See especially Hans Robert Jauss'sreprinted contribution, "Kunst als Anti-Natur: Zur asthetischenWende nach 1789," pp. 209-43.18See the discussion of Cartesian mathematics, in particularDescartes's introduction of notational signs into geometry, inLines of Thought, part 2, chapter 5, "Letters and Lines: Algebraand Geometry in Descartes' Geometry."19Descartes, Regulae,Rule XVI, vol. 1, p. 186.20Descartes, Regulae,Rule VII, vol. 1, p. 109.

4