The following article was originally published in the April-May 2013 edition of Red Pepper (Issue 189).

Who can share what on the internet? There is an increasing awareness of debates around illegal sharing through high profile court cases and controversies in the news – through things like the Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, or the recent tragic case of Aaron Swartz. But what about legal sharing? What kinds of information should we be able to use and share with others as a matter of principle?

Is digital material that can be legally shared with others nothing but the residue from all the valuable stuff that is worthy of protection? Once all of the good stuff is packaged up and sold from behind clickwrap agreements, digital rights management technologies, iTunes stores and subscription paywalls, is there nothing left but a strange wasteland of free giveaways, taster content, third-rate amateurism, pamphlets, ads and piracy? Or can we think of a more positive characterisation of that body of culture, research and public information which should be free for everyone to use, enjoy and benefit from as a matter of principle?

The laws, policies and discourses concerning the way that we share the fruits of our intellectual labour (whether patterns of pixels, waves, words, chemicals, DNA, or software instructions) tend to focus on individual innovation, originality, protection and compensation, rather than on collaboration, shared tradition, iteration and equitable access. We tend to talk about these fruits first and foremost as commodities for which their creators or owners are entitled to receive return on their investment.

Why? In many ways we live in the shadow of certain romantic conceptions of cultural and intellectual innovation from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reacting against models of literary and artistic creation which privileged imitation of the classics and striving towards perfection within an established tradition, this period saw a general turn towards the individual genius who broke previous rules and invented new ones. Through this new aesthetic frame, the world was divided into visionary and rebellious pioneers and slavish imitators.

Stories like this remain very influential – from the restless obsession with conceptual novelty exhibited by much of the contemporary art world, to the elevation of the ‘disruptive’ entrepreneur or the renegade maverick in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. Rules are to be broken, temples smashed, traditions overcome by a caste of outstanding individuals leading us over the bleeding edge. New voices need to define themselves against others – and are haunted by the fear of being derivative, by the ‘anxiety of influence’.

While this picture arose as a cultural response to the predominance of aesthetic classicism, it was happily embraced by publishers, lawyers and theorists who were looking for new ways of conceptualising the legal and philosophical foundations of ‘the copyright’ and what would later become known as ‘intellectual property’. It still continues to exert significant influence on the way that we think about creativity and intellectual labour, as well as on the formation of laws and policies that dictate the way that information moves around in society.

Large rightsholders and lobbyists who work on their behalf are certainly not afraid to use this to their advantage. Rather than directly addressing the economic interests of big rightsholders, industry associations and lobbyists talk in terms of protecting the interests of innovative individuals: authors, musicians, and scholars. To give just one example, the Motion Picture Association of America, supported by some of the biggest players in the film industry – Disney, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Brothers – claims to pursue “commonsense solutions” that “[protect] the rights of all who make something of value with their minds, their passion and their unique creative vision”.

This notion of the individual innovator, the lone pioneer breaking rules and creating new paradigms is only one side of the romantic story about literary creativity. The other side of this story (perhaps less useful for those who were keen to expand property rights to products of the mind) is that great new works inevitably depend on and build on shared cultural tradition. The poet Edward Young – whose tract on literary composition sold out twice in Germany in the mid eighteenth century – said that literary genius grew like a new plant out of a shared body of culture. The philosopher and literary critic Johann Gottfried Herder, greatly influenced by Edward Young, said that literary geniuses like Shakespeare depended on a fertile body of stories, songs, characters and metaphors, the soil out of which groundbreaking new works could grow – a thought which catalysed collections of folk tales like those of the Brothers Grimm.

When we think, speak, and express ourselves we cannot help but use words, ideas, structures, tropes, conventions, operations that come to us from others. We are always already standing on the shoulders of giants, and we can but supplement (not escape from or reinvent) the shared traditions through which we articulate ourselves. Individual innovation and invention is predicated upon what we inherit and borrow from others – from the languages we speak to the the archives of texts that make up a body of disciplinary knowledge. Having access to these traditions and bodies of knowledge is an essential precondition for the creation of new works of the mind.

We need a more balanced way of thinking and talking about how information is shared – one that moves beyond a near exclusive focus on compensation and control. Laws and policies which govern the way information is shared in society need to more explicitly recognise and promote the intrinsic and extrinsic benefits of increasing access, and enabling reuse. We are beginning to see the emegence of a broader public conversation around benefits of sharing information, but this is often focused on edge cases and transgression rather than framed in terms of a positive conception of a shared body of information which everyone can to acess and use via the internet.

The battle for a shared commons of digital information is being fought on many fronts. Digital copies of works which have fallen out of copyright hundreds of years ago continue to be locked up and sold by companies like Gale Cengage, whose subsciption fees were so exorbitant that a national agency had to intervene to cut a special deal to enable university researchers in the UK to have access to them (if you’re not affiliated with a university that has access – you won’t be able to read any of these texts on the web). Many governments around the world still have exclusive contracts to sell critical information to private companies, who then sell on access to other companies and to the public. This means that in many countries around the world, you have to pay a third party company for a subscription if you want to know the text of the laws that govern you. Big academic publishers continue to use free labour from university students and employees to produce and review academic journal articles, selling subscriptions back to their libraries for extortionate prices.

We need a more widely accepted positive conception of a body of digital material that everyone is free to access and use in perpetuity – including essential information about the world that can be used to enable better journalism and better policy-making (from more granular and timely carbon emissions data to information on who is lobbying), access to research (such as mandates to give the public access to research they have paid for or supporting the release of information about clinical trials related to drugs that our medical services prescribe), and historical and cultural works which have entered the public domain.

There are still substantive debates to be had about the balance between open access and enabling creators to make a living from their work – as well as which policies and models support this balance. And there is plenty of work to be done to ensure that the exploitation of old industries built on the control and sale of wax, tape and dead tree aren’t replaced by new forms of monopoly and control from fast growing technology corporations. But it is imperative that recognition of open access to certain information as a matter of principle (not just through accident or transgression) becomes an essential part of 21st century knowledge policy and the more public discourse around it. We need new and better stories about the importance of collaboration and access – about common traditions and building on shared bodies of evidence, reasoning, reflection and creativity – to complement the much more dominant stories about isolated geniuses and just deserts.

Insofar as the most innovative instruments of the era – the telescope and the microscope – extended the range and acuity of one sense in particular, scientific experience tended to privilege the visual, with its capacity to produce knowledge at a distance, over the other senses. Even when Bacon castigated normal vision for staying on the surface of things and failing to pay attention to the invisible world beneath, he hoped that ultimately its secrets would be “brought to light.” Paracelsus’s metaphor of “overhearing” nature’s secrets was laid to rest. Abetted by innovations in the perspectivalist depiction of space on Renaissance canvases, which seemed to be in tune with the rationalized universe assumed by the new science, the hegemony of the eye meant not only the denigration of the other senses, but also the decontextualisation of experience in general. A few unheralded figures aside – the Portugese philosopher John Poinsot (1589-1644) has been recently raised from obscurity to play the role of rule-proving exception – modern thinkers tended to suppress the semiotic and cultural mediation of experience and seek to ground it firmly in pure, primarily visual, observation and controlled experimentation.

“If melodiously piping flutes sprang from the olive, would you doubt that a knowledge of flute-playing resided in the olive? And what if plane trees bore harps which gave forth rhythmical sounds? Clearly you would think in the same way that the art of music was possessed by plane trees.”¹

1. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. Francis Brooks (London: Methuen, 1896), Book II, §VIII.

SLEEPLESS CITY, in northern Nigeria. The inhabitants have the singular habit of never sleeping, and have therefore no idea of what sleep is.

The city is a particularly dangerous place for strangers. If a traveller should happen to overlook the local nocturnal custom and fall asleep – as he is probably accustomed to do at night – the natives, believing him dead, will proceed to dig a large grave and with great ceremony bury him immediately.

(A.J.N. Tremearne, Hausa Superstitions and Customs, London, 1913)

In the following passage he has just informed d’Alembert, much to the latter’s astonishment, that he knows how to make marble have “active sensitiveness” like that which is possessed animals and people.

d’Alembert: And how?

Diderot: How? I shall make it edible.

d’Alembert: Make marble edible? That doesn’t seem easy to me.

Diderot: It’s my business to show you the process. I take the statue you see there, I put it in a mortar, then with great blows from a pestle …

d’Alembert: Careful, please; that’s Falconet’s masterpiece! If it were only by Huez or some one like that –.

Diderot: Falconet won’t mind; the statue is paid for, and Falconet cares little for present respect and not at all for that of posterity.

d’Alembert: Go on then, crush it to powder.

Diderot: When a block or marble is reduced to impalpable powder, I mix it with humus or leaf-mould; I knead them well together; I water the mixture, I let it decompose for a year or two or a hundred, time doesn’t matter to me. When the whole has turned into a more or less homogenous substance, into humus, do you know what I do?

d’Alembert: I’m sure you don’t eat humus.

Diderot: No; but there is a connection, of assimilation, a link, between the humus and myself, a latus as the chemist would say.

d’Alembert: And that is plant life?

Diderot: Quite right, I sow peas, beans, cabbages, and other vegetables; these plants feed on the soil and I feed on the plants.

d’Alembert: Whether it’s true or false, I like this passage from marble into humus, from humus to the vegetable kingdom, from the vegetable to the animal kingdom, to flesh.

Diderot: So, then, I make flesh, or soul as my daughter said, an actively sensitive substance […]¹

Later in the dialogue Diderot asks d’Alembert to imagine a harpsichord “endowed with the faculty of feeding and reproducing itself”, male and female harpsichords and “little harpsichords, also living and vibrating”.

Diderot: […] There came a moment of madness when the feeling harpsichord thought that it was the only harpsichord in the world, and that the whole harmony of the universe resided in it.²

1. Extract from “Conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot”, Diderot, Interpreter of Nature, trans. Jean Stewart and Jonathan Kemp (New York: International Publishers, 1937) and quoted in Lewis White Beck (ed.), 18th-Century Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1966), pp. 173-174.
2. Ibid, p. 179.

In his 1917 essay “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy”, Benjamin wrote: “The great transformation and correction which must be performed upon the concept of experience, oriented so one-sidedly along mathematical-mechanical lines, can be attained only by relating knowledge to language, as was attempted by Hamann during Kant’s lifetime.”¹

In this paper I will look at Benjamin’s reading of Johann Georg Hamann, and how Hamannian themes shaped the development of Benjamin’s philosophy – in particular the turn away from philosophical reason (“the unnatural use of abstractions”²) and towards a richer understanding of language and experience.

I will argue that Hamann’s account of the relationship between language and experience (including his reflections on what language is and where it comes from, and his broadening of the concept of experience from one predominantly focused on evidence to one that accommodates religious and aesthetic feelings) anticipates many themes in Benjamin’s philosophy – and that his style and writing strategy may also have exercised an influence over the latter.

Finally I shall close with a philosophical examination of their proposed re-evaluation of the concept of experience, and how this might contribute to contemporary philosophical debate.

1. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 107-108.
2. Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 79.

In 1676 Leibniz found a pretext to visit Spinoza in The Hague, having learned that Spinoza was at work on a philosophical treatise of great importance. Spinoza showed Leibniz the manuscript of the Ethics, and the two men discussed philosophy together over several days. Although there is no written record of their conversation, it seems likely that these discussions were among the most rewarding in the whole history of philosophy.

Here’s an excerpt:

Europe’s digital library Europeana has been described as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the sprawling web estate of EU institutions.

It aggregates digitised books, paintings, photographs, recordings and films from over 2,200 contributing cultural heritage organisations across Europe – including major national bodies such as the British Library, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum.

Today Europeana is opening up data about all 20 million of the items it holds under the CC0 rights waiver. This means that anyone can reuse the data for any purpose – whether using it to build applications to bring cultural content to new audiences in new ways, or analysing it to improve our understanding of Europe’s cultural and intellectual history.

You can read the full article here.

The PHILOS-L mailing list is one of the largest English language email lists for philosophy in Europe. The list was founded in 1989 by Professor Stephen Clark and is hosted at the University of Liverpool. It includes details of jobs, conferences, talks, calls for papers, and new publications in philosophy.

In case you’d prefer to follow the list outside the bustle of your inbox (e.g. using an app on your phone or tablet) I’ve just generated an RSS feed for the list, as well as associated Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I’ve got a chapter on “Hamann, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein on the Language of Philosophers” in Hamann and the Tradition, which has just been published by Northwestern University Press.

The book is based on a series of papers given at an international conference on Hamann in New York in March 2009. It is edited by Lisa Marie Anderson, who organised the conference and also translated Hegel’s essay on Hamann.

I’ve uploaded a post-print version of the chapter to the institutional repository of Royal Holloway, University of London. You can download a PDF copy here. It is listed on PhilPapers here.

Here is an excerpt:

In this chapter I shall examine some of Johann Georg Hamann’s claims about how philosophers misuse, misunderstand, and are misled by language. I will then examine how he anticipates things that Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein say on this topic. All three thinkers are suspicious of philosophers who consider artificial systems of “pure reason” or “formal logic” more valuable than natural language in the search for philosophical insight. They all challenge the notion that natural language “gets in the way” of reason, and should be radically formalized into (or even retired in favor of) a more logically or conceptually perfect language. Hamann is responding to the enthusiasm for reine Vernunft exhibited by his friend Immanuel Kant and the loose-knit group that would later come to be known as the Aufklärer. Nietzsche is profoundly critical of the idealism of many of his philosophical predecessors, including Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Wittgenstein turns away from Frege’s and Russell’s logical philosophies, and rejects the British idealism (deeply influenced by Kant and Hegel) that had been dominant in earlier decades.

Hamann, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein all contend that reason and logic come from and are dependent upon natural language, which changes over time, and which responds to the interests and circumstances of its users. They all suggest that philosophers can benefit from a richer and more nuanced awareness of how our concepts and the ways in which we reason are born out of language, which is a complex, dynamic, variegated phenomenon, reflecting the complex, dynamic, variegated nature of human life and behavior.

While the extent to which one can trace direct lines of influence from Hamann to Nietzsche to Wittgenstein is debatable, Hamann was an important influence on the post-Kantian German philosophical landscape which informed Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s work. While Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are often effectively regarded as isolates, much is to be gained by examining the rich tradition in which they stand. This essay strives to flesh out and examine three small episodes in a much bigger story about the turn to language in German philosophy.