Re: Gobineau, the "Bayreuth Circle" and Schemann

Laon, are you working on a Ph.D in Wagner studies as you announced as
your intention some time ago? If not, what are you doing? One would
hope such scholarship will eventually reach beyod an internet message
board...

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Laon) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> 2     Gobineau's racial taxonomy 
> 
> I've noted that Gobineau's belief that race is the single factor that
> determines human history, culture and civilisation, is the Gobinist
> equivalent of Marx's belief that economics is the single factor that
> determines human history, culture and civilisation. Marx was an
> economic determinist; Gobineau was a racial determinist.
> 
> The parallels between Gobineau and Marx don't end there. Gobineau's
> exhaustive racial taxonomy is the equivalent of Marx's exhaustive
> analysis of capital. That is, Gobineau's analysis of the human
> "races", with his infinitely detailed categories and subcategories, is
> the central intellectual project of Gobinism, just as the analysis of
> capitalist relations is the central intellectual project in Marx's
> work. Both men also developed a theory of history, but we'll come to
> that later.
> 
> As previously noted, Gobineau wasn't the father of scientific racism,
> as he's so often called; he wasnt the father of anything.  What is
> called Gobineau's racial theory was not devised by Gobineay: it was
> mainstream anthropological science of his day. We now know it was bad
> science, but the idea that there are distinct races with differing
> capabilities and mental characteristics was the respectable mainstream
> science of Gobineau's time and place.
> 
> In a sense it was no more culpable for Gobineau to have believed in
> the inequality of human races than it was for Alexander Pope to have
> believed in the phlogiston theory, or for Shelley to have believed
> that when high clouds appeared to travel against the wind, it was
> because they were driven by discharge of electrical energy (an idea
> that crops up in his poem "The Cloud"). Gobineau, pope and Shelley
> were intelligent, interested, well-read laypeople, who followed the
> science of their day, and in each instance the mainstream science they
> adopted happened to be wrong.
> 
> In Gobineau's case the science happened not only to be wrong, but
> eventually to have tragic consequences. Still, in joining this general
> condemnation of Gobineau I'm reminded that as a layperson I read The
> Scientist, New Scientist and the occasional slightly more academic
> piece, and I mostly (not always) trust what seems to be the scientific
> consensus. It's generally a reasonable trust to have, but mainstream
> science sometimes makes horrible mistakes. Gobineau's eternal ill fame
> rests on the fact that early anthropological science made some of the
> worst mistakes with some of the worst consequences: but he accepted
> and repeated what the best authorities told him.
> 
> The racial theory that Gobineau drew on essentially came from no less
> respected a scientist than Carl von Linné, or Carolus Linnaeus
> (1707-1778), better remembered these days for his taxonomy of plants,
> rather than for his taxonomy of human races, a thing we'd rasther
> forget these days. Linnaeus built on the writings of still earlier
> scientists and philosophers, who could in turn be identified, but
> teasing out the real origins of "bad racial science" is probably
> impossible. The evolution of these ideas as a stream in Western
> thought can be traced back as far as the ancient Greeks.
> 
> Anyway, Linnaeus proposed a system in which humanity is divided into
> four races. He assigned each race differing capabilities and
> characteristics in a way that now makes slightly comic reading:
> * White people, who were supposedly inventive and energetic, but
> fortunately very moral and law-abiding;
> * Red people, meaning American Indians, who were supposed to be
> enduring but not adaptable, and whose horizons are limited by their
> adherence to custom;
> * Yellow people, meaning the various Asian peoples, who were supposed
> to be almost as intelligent as white people, but not as energetic or
> inventive; they are inflexible and prone to melancholy;
> * Black people, who were supposed to be physically strong, but lazy
> and thoughtless, a categorisation that happened to provide a sort of
> justification for the slave trade.
> 
> Linnaeus was followed by another eminent scientist whose name is still
> remembered and respected today, the anatomist, zoologist,
> paleontologist and geologist Georges Cuvier (1769 - 1832). Cuvier
> adopted most of Linnaeus' system, but simplified the Linnaean system
> from four races to three. Cuvier did this by incorporating the "red"
> peoples into the "yellow" category, because the American Indian
> peoples had entered the Americas by crossing the Bering Strait from
> Asia.
> 
> As with Linnaeus, Cuvier assigned different physical, intellectual and
> moral characteristics to each race, these supposed characteristics
> being largely based on a mixture of traveller's tales and European
> wishful thinking. Both men's systems happened to flatter white people,
> while suggesting that black people are suitable for slavery.
> 
> So Cuvier's theory specified just three basic races: 
> * White (clever, industrious, inventive and good, and reasonably
> strong);
> * Yellow (quite clever, reasonably moral, but not inventive, energetic
> or strong); and
> * Black (neither clever, nor inventive, nor good; but energetic and
> physically strong).
> 
> The layman Gobineau adopted the Cuvier system because it was generally
> accepted anthropological science. There were other, competing systems
> of racial taxonomy available in the 1840s and 1850s, but there is
> nothing surprising, let alone original, about Gobineau adopting
> Cuvier's system. Gobineau was not even the first populariser of racial
> ideas to do so. Robert Knox, Karl Carus, Gustav Klemm and a number of
> others wrote popular books on race before Gobineau, each of which
> adopted a form of Cuvier's general system. Cuvier was the most
> respected name in the field, by some margin.
> 
> It's worth observing that fortunately for Cuvier's reputation his
> texts on race appear never, not once, to have been translated into
> English. I have no desire to diminish Cuvier's reputation, as he was
> simply a man of his time. Linnaeus too.  But the fact that we hold
> Linnaeus' and Cuvier's names in high esteem while we condemn
> Gobineau's rests more on luck than justice*.
> 
> The bulk of Gobineau's _Essai sur l'inegalité des races humaines_ is
> taken up with two things:
> * Gobineau's taxonomy of races; and 
> * A racially determinist theory of history.  
> 
> These two topics are hard to separate chapter by chapter, as Gobineau
> is not a remarkably systematic thinker or writer. But together they
> make up the great bulk of the _Essai_: books II to VI of Gobineau's
> six books: that is, the last quarter of volume I, plus all of volumes
> II, III and IV of Gobineau's four volumes.
> 
> First, Gobineau describes his three races, white, yellow and black, in
> the same general terms as Cuvier (see above). Then he divides each
> race in categories, and each category in subcategories, and each
> subcategory into ? and so on.
> 
> Thus Gobineau divided the "white" race into various divisions, the
> best-known of these being the Aryans; the Assyrians were another. He
> divided the Assyrians into the Jews, the Phoenicians, the Lydians and
> the Carthaginians, while he divided the Aryans into the Hindu, the
> Iranian, the Hellenic, the Celtic, the Slavonic and the Germanic
> peoples. The Yellow and Black races are similarly divided and
> subdivided.
> 
> Gobineau then subdivided each of the subcategories into further
> sub-subcategories, and ... so on.
> 
> This exercise is how Gobineau's book got to be so long, and, as Wagner
> found, so very tedious. But long and tedious as it was, and is, this
> was the meat, the core, of Gobineau's racial theory.
> 
> So what was Wagner's reaction to all of Gobineau's hard work? 
> 
> 
> In a word, derision. In another, boredom. 
> 
> Wagner accepted the division of humanity into three racial groups,
> white, yellow and black, but that is no evidence of influence from
> Gobineau. As noted, that was a commonplace among educated people of
> the time, including people with exploitative agenda such as advocates
> of slavery, but also people who opposed racial exploitation, such as
> Darwin, Lincoln and Wagner.
> 
> I have found nothing in Wagner's essays, letters and remarks recorded
> by Cosima, to suggest that he was ever interested in Gobineau's vast
> racial taxonomy, or that he accepted it, or that he was influenced by
> it.
> 
> The overwhelming majority of Wagner's comments on Gobineau's _Essai_
> are negative. Wagner expressed positive views of just three things in
> the book.
> 
> First, Wagner said Gobineau's view of France was convincing. I haven't
> identified which passage in Gobineau that Wagner referred to: given
> Wagner's general view of the French, the temptation is to assume it
> was something uncomplimentary.
> 
> Second, Wagner liked Gobineau's chapter on civilisation, in the first
> volume.
> 
> Third, and much later, Wagner liked the "beginning of Ch. 3 of Volume
> 4" [Monday 9 May, 1882], said Cosima. And a couple of days later, she
> said, he read those pages "which he so loves" aloud to the Count
> himself [Thursday 12 May 1882].
> 
> It's not quite clear which chapter Wagner meant, unfortunately. This
> is because the breaks between the books of Gobineau's _Essai_ do not
> correspond to the breaks between the volumes. Thus Volume III ends
> with Chapter I of Book VI. Volume four therefore begins with Chapter
> II of Volume VI.
> 
> So did Cosima mean that Wagner liked the chapter of Volume IV that was
> titled Chapter 3 ["The Capacity of the Native German Races"]? Or did
> she mean that he liked the third chapter in that volume, which is
> actually called Chapter 4 ["Germanic Rome; the Romano-Celtic and
> romano-Germanic armies; the German emperors"]?
> 
> I don't know. Worse, some vile animal has borrowed the Sydney Uni
> library's copy of the _Essai_, so at the moment I can't look up these
> two chapters and make a guess as to what it might have been, at the
> beginning of either chapter, that Wagner liked. My guess is that in
> Chapter III Gobineau would have opened with flattering remarks about
> the early Germans as described by Tacitus and other contemporary
> authorities (not the same people as the Germans of Wagner's day), and
> in the case of Chapter IV Gobineau would have opened with a review of
> the Grandeur that was Rome.
> 
> Regardless, these three or four isolated positive reactions are more
> than outweighed by Wagner's negative comments, during the painful
> process of reading Gobineau's work. Wagner's comments show him being
> bored by the book, finding it far too long, finding it ludicrous,
> finding it annoying, finding it unintentionally funny, finding that it
> was less significant than he had originally thought, and so on.  Later
> Wagner dismissed it, along with all of Gobineau's thought, as
> impressively broad, and even acute, but lacking in profundity. Thus
> there is no shortage of evidence on Wagner's reaction to Gobineau's
> racial work, and it's overwhelmingly in one direction.
> 
> I've quoted most of Wagner's remarks on Gobineau's racial
> classifications earlier in this thread so I won't repeat the citations
> here.  There were things in Gobineau's book that Wagner respected, and
> I will come to those and give them full weight, but the main body of
> Gobineau's theory, his racial taxonomy, is not one of the things that
> Wagner respected. Gobineau's analysis of race inspired Wagner with
> alternate boredom and derision.
>       
> Gobineau's theory of history is my next topic, then perhaps the idea
> of racial masters, and then degeneration through miscegenation. The
> latter of which sounds like my idea of a good time. But this post is
> long enough now, except for a very boring footnote on Cuvier's works
> on race.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> 
> Laon
> 
> * Cuvier's work on race mainly appeared in his _ Leçons d'anatomie
> comparativée_ (1800), and _Histoire des Sciences Naturelles, depuis
> leur origine jusqu'à nos jours, chez tous les peoples connu, professée
> au College de France_. I can't find an earlier publication date than
> 1840 for the second work, but it was probably first published before
> Cuvier's death in 1832.
> 
> There was also the _Histoire naturelle des l'homme, par M. le Compte
> de Lacépède, précédée par son éloge historique, par le baron G
> Cuvier_, by La Cépède, M. le comte de (Bernard Germain Etienne de La
> Ville sur Illon). I can't find an earlier edition than 1839, but La
> Cépède's dates are 1756-1825, so we'll assume first publication before
> 1825. I said it was boring.