Are Mountains Arbitrary?
This article is the third in a series of responses to Episode 2.1 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.
In Episodes 2.1 and 2.2 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast, Ryan McDermott explains the sense in which “modernity” is typically employed in this journal and project at large. Modernity is here less a particular historical designation (the “modern era” as the age postdating the Middle Ages, or literary “modernism” as a period spanning the first half of the 20th century) as it is a claim about the relationship—generally one of rupture—between the present and the past. Genealogies of Modernity is interested in interrogating various historical claims of divergence from the past, whether this purported change is marked by the end of the Warring States period in ancient China or the advent of smartphones in the 21st century.
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-1902), Philadelphia Museum of Art
“Climbing the Mountains of Modernity,” the opening episode of McDermott’s National Endowment for the Humanities-backed series, focuses on the role of mountains in various “modernity claims” throughout history. One of the things the episode does well is to quickly establish (and then to deconstruct) the ways in which certain mountain climbing feats (Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux in 1339; Tenzing Norgay and Ed Hillary’s ascent of Mount Everest in 1953) have been invoked to designate moments of rupture from the past.
One fascinating question which underlies this study of “mountain modernities” is this: is there anything inherent in mountains that make our relationship to them genuine markers of change in human history? In an 1805 passage from his Notebooks (on what he calls the “magnitudinal sublimity” of mountains), Samuel Taylor Coleridge asks a cognate question:
[W]hy do I seek for mountains, when in the flattest countries the clouds present so many and so much more romantic and spacious forms…?... Do I not, more or less consciously, fancy myself a Lilliputian to whom these [clouds] would be mountains, and so, by this factitious scale, make them mountains?
Most genealogists of modernity, I think, will claim that the mountain itself is ultimately something arbitrary. Fredric Jameson offers a strong version of this thesis. In several of his works, but particularly in A Singular Modernity, Jameson argues that any “event” in human history—anything that is invoked as a marker of an (ostensibly) ontological change between the “premodern” and the “modern”—will always come down to some radically constructed activity. To “periodize,” he argues—to designate moments of rupture between historical epochs—is always and necessarily to do violence to history, to tell an untruth about the relationship between present and past.
And yet, Jameson proceeds, we really have no choice: we cannot possibly view all of human history as an unbroken “chronicle” exclusive of ruptures. To designate Petrarch’s 1339 ascent of Mount Ventoux as a watershed in human history is, in certain obvious respects, a ridiculous claim. The borders we draw between historical moments are no more “real” than the border we have drawn between Ohio and Pennsylvania. If, however, we are to have any account of history whatsoever, we have no choice but to draw these arbitrary lines—even as our narrative distorts the very history we are attempting to grasp. Hence Jameson’s famous dilemma: we cannot but do violence to history; “we cannot not periodize.”
The picture I have laid out so far emphases the sense in which “modernity claims”—mountainous or otherwise—are usually understood to be radically constructed, or unreal. This deconstructionist tendency is a productive one, and I often find myself sympathetic towards this form of criticism. In the course my time serving as interim editor for this journal, however, I have grown increasingly interested in the rare cast of thinkers who are committed to the possibility of ontological ruptures in history—commitment to the possibility that when Virginia Woolf claimed, ''On or about December 1910 human character changed,'' this is perhaps a true claim about reality: a claim as real as “On or about December 7,000,000 BCE humans began to walk upright.”
Perhaps the most captivating thinker in this direction is philosopher and poet Owen Barfield. Famous to most readers as an Inklings member and close friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Barfield is important in my own area of scholarship as an idiosyncratic, brilliant, and deeply theological reader of Coleridge.
Barfield is committed to the fundamental thesis that human nature itself can (and does) change. This change, which is nearly analogous with biological change, represents an historical process he calls “the evolution of consciousness.” The upshot of this thesis—which is outlined in a series of recent Genealogies of Modernity articles by Ashton Arnoldy and Jeffrey Hipolito—is that we can speak to real kinds of change over history which reflect different modes of how human consciousness relates to the world. (The most important of such changes, as Barfield argues at the conclusion of Saving the Appearances, is the Christian event of the Incarnation.)
Portrait of STC by Peter Vandyke, 1795
I don’t want to tread into Barfield’s (often very difficult) argument here, but I do want to at least gesture towards his take on “mountain modernities.” In one sense, Barfield would agree that the mountain is an arbitrary image: we may just as well invoke images of a river or the sea in our modernity claims (as Coleridge is sometimes understood as doing with the “burst” unto the “silent sea” of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—an image Barfield echoes in The Tower). And yet Barfield would also want to emphasize that the mountain (or whatever symbol we choose from nature) does reflect real kinds of difference with the past, precisely insofar as our relationship to the symbol can reveal a different kind of consciousness of the world. Coleridge is here an exemplary and unusual case: he is famous not for his ascent of Scafell, but his descent, where his imaginative posture towards nature is on full display (and which is often speciously described as the first sports climb in history).
Barfield represents a rare figure who is comfortable staking serious “modernity claims.” His commitment to real moments of rupture, however, does not make the past alien to him. On one hand, Barfield thinks it is impossible for us to “see” a mountain in the same way that Homer did: we operate (as Thomas Kuhn would say) in incommensurable paradigms. And yet since all imagination, all forms of reason and perception participate in a common, underling logos, we are able to arbitrate somewhat, to reach imaginatively across our incommensurable paradigms, particularly through the medium of poetic language. Barfield’s life’s work was committed to this claim: he developed an entire theory of etymology around the thesis that “language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul.”
In short: if we find Barfield convincing, we may, after all, want to say that we are modern in certain ways that do mark ontological differences from the past. And yet, as Coleridge reminds us, to distinguish history is not necessarily to divide it—and it is precisely by interrogating our sense of relationship with the past that we are able to learn something about where we stand today.
Here we might follow Barfield in taking the lead of Coleridge, who is hailed by John Stuart Mill as a kind of exemplar genealogist, one who sees our relationship with the past as constructive rather than destructive:
[Jeremy] Bentham judged a proposition true or false as it accorded or not with the result of his own inquiries; and did not search very curiously into what might be meant by the proposition, when it obviously did not mean what he thought true. With Coleridge, on the contrary, the very fact that any doctrine had been believed by thoughtful men. and received by whole nations or generations of mankind was part of the problem to be solved, was one of the phenomena to be accounted for.
Jake Grefenstette (PhD, Cambridge) is president and executive director of the International Poetry Forum. He also currently serves as interim editor of the Genealogies of Modernity journal.
