A Republic of Letters

During the period now called the Enlightenment, from the late 17th through the 18th and 19th Century, there was a "Republic of Letters".  The various "philosphes" of Europe and the eventually the New World shared their ideas, their theories, and their lives by mail.  Their correspondence was prodigious--my volume of the letters between the German thinkers Goethe and Schiller is over 500 pages long.  They shared everything from poems to garden seeds--the thirst for knowledge was omnivorous.  They respected one another's cultural differences, indeed reveled in them--practicing foreign idioms on each other.  They also had their rivalries, each trying to outdo the other in advancing knowledge.  Yet it is hard not to think of their time as somehow more innocent than ours, their motives for intellectual work more clear.  They wished to expand knowledge for its own sake--to improve the life of all, not necessarily for their own profit (indeed their own societies often forbade profiting by their experiments).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In our day such idealism is scoffed at or derided as the mark of privilege.  Certainly those were privileged men, but they recognized their privilege and tried to espy all the further into the working of the universe because of it.



It is a wonderful thing that the availability today of such an unprecedented network of information and the possibility of instant correspondence allows us to get in touch with other thinkers.  Just today I emailed a scholar who wrote the only article I can find on one of the subjects of my research.  It was that easy, and now I too have joined the ongoing Republic of Letters.

Academics are often derided as living in an Ivory Tower, or of being uniformly liberal, or of being out of touch with reality, in short of being privileged.  I think all of those charges have a basis, but not one of them is fair.  Academia is about ideas, and my little corner of it--the humanities and specifically literature--is about reading the ideas that shape the world out of the stories that we tell ourselves, the poems that ennoble our daily language.  It is about daily life, and it isn't political in the sense of left v. right.  It is political in the sense that it requires us to make decisions about what matters, who matters, and why it matters.  So yes, most academics have (worked hard to have) the privilege to spend their time with such ideas. But, on the whole, isn't it necessary to have some members of society with the privilege to speak (at their best) truth to power? And how can that be anything but freeing?