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Metaphor of Dwarf and Giantt

The document discusses Jonathan Swift's satire "The Battle of the Books" and the intellectual debate it was based on between advocates of ancient and modern thought. In the late 17th century, there was a dispute in France and England over whether modern scholarship had surpassed the knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome. Sir William Temple argued modern thinkers stood on the "shoulders of giants" and built on ancient foundations. Swift engaged with this quarrel through his satire, seeing the issues it raised as still relevant to philosophy, poetry and politics. The document argues Leo Strauss helped provide modern insight into Swift's work by elucidating the debate between ancients and moderns.

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145 views

Metaphor of Dwarf and Giantt

The document discusses Jonathan Swift's satire "The Battle of the Books" and the intellectual debate it was based on between advocates of ancient and modern thought. In the late 17th century, there was a dispute in France and England over whether modern scholarship had surpassed the knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome. Sir William Temple argued modern thinkers stood on the "shoulders of giants" and built on ancient foundations. Swift engaged with this quarrel through his satire, seeing the issues it raised as still relevant to philosophy, poetry and politics. The document argues Leo Strauss helped provide modern insight into Swift's work by elucidating the debate between ancients and moderns.

Uploaded by

sneha
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Metaphor of dwarf and giant

“The Battle of the Books” begins with a note from the bookseller to the
reader, telling the reader that it refers to a “famous dispute … about ancient
and modern learning.” Sir William Temple had taken the side of the ancients
against Charles Boyle, who had praised the ancient writer Phalaris, but
Wotton and Bentley had taken Boyle’s side. The controversy led to a battle
between the books themselves, literally, in the King’s library. The
manuscript about the battle is incomplete, so we still do not know who
won.Then comes a preface from the author in which the nature of satire is
discussed. Most people do not see themselves in the satire, seeing only
others, and it is not a problem when someone sees himself and get
offended, since in anger his counter-arguments are weak. Weak satires
apply “wit without knowledge,” while strong ones have depth.The main tale
begins with reflections about the causes of battles: mainly, pride and want.
Like dogs, people fight over scarce resources but tend to be at peace during
times of plenty.

The quarrel itself is today regarded as a petty thing, rather ridiculous on


both sides, a conventional debate between old and new, reactionary and
progressive, which later ages have resolved by way of synthesis. The quarrel
is looked on largely as a purely literary dispute, originating in the
comparison of Greek and Roman poetry with French. Now this
understanding is quite different from that of the participants, who, if not
always the best judges, must be the first witnesses in any hearing. They
understood the debate over poetry to be a mere subdivision of an
opposition between two comprehensive systems of radically opposed
thought, one finding its source in ancient philosophy, the other in modern
philosophy. The moderns believed that they had found the true principles of
nature, and that, by means of their methods, new sources of power could be
found in physical nature, politics, and the arts. These new principles
represented a fundamental break with classical thought and were
incompatible with it.

In his own way, Swift presents and contrasts those principles. He


characterizes ancient philosophy as a bee whose wings produce music and
flight and who thus visits all the blossoms of the field and garden … and in
collecting from them enriches himself without the least injury to their
beauty, their smell, or their taste. This bee is opposed to a house-building
spider, who thinks he produces his own world from himself and is hence
independent, but who actually feeds on filth and produces excrement. As
the bee says, So, in short, the question comes all to this; whether is the
nobler being of the two, that by a lazy contemplation of four inches round,
by an overweening pride, feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into
excrement or venom, producing nothing at all, but flybane and a cobweb; or
that which by a universal range, with long search, much study, true
judgment, and distinction of things, brings honey and wax.

This description is drawn from one of Swift’s earliest writings, The Battle of
the Books.Throughout his life Swift saw the Quarrel between the Ancients
and the Moderns as the issue in physics, poetry, and politics, and it is in the
light of it that he directed his literary career and his practical life. The
quarrel is the key to the diverse strands of this various man; his standards
of judgment are all classical; his praise and blame are always in accord with
that of Plato. He learned how to live within his own time in the perspective
of an earlier one. Swift, the Tory and the High Churchman, was a republican
and a nonbeliever.

Gulliver’s Travels , one of his masterpieces, is always said to be a satire, and


there is no reason to quarrel with this designation. But it is not sufficient,
for satire is concerned with a view to what is serious and ridiculous, good
and bad. It is not enough to say that human folly is ridiculed; what was
follow to Aristophanes would not have seemed so to Tertullian, and
conversely. If the specific intention of the satire is not uncovered, the work
is trivialized. Swift intended his book to instruct, and the character of that
instruction is lost if we do not take seriously the issues he takes seriously.
But we do not even recognize the real issues in the Quarrel, let alone try to
decide which side had the greatest share of truth. In our time, only Leo
Strauss has provided us with the scholarship and the philosophic insight
necessary to a proper confrontation of ancients and moderns, and hence
his works are the prolegomena to a recovery of Swift’s teaching.

In France at the end of the seventeenth century, a minor furore arose over
the question of whether contemporary learning had surpassed what was
known by those in Classical Greece and Rome. The "moderns" (epitomised
by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle) took the position that the modern age of
science and reason was superior to the superstitious and limited world of
Greece and Rome. In his opinion, modern man saw farther than the ancients
ever could. The "ancients," for their part, argued that all that is necessary to
be known was to be found in Virgil, Cicero, Homer, and especially Aristotle.

This literary contest was re-enacted in miniature in England when Sir


William Temple published an answer to Fontenelle entitled Of Ancient and
Modern Learning in 1690. His essay introduced two metaphors to the
debate that would be reused by later authors. First, he proposed that
modern man was just a dwarf standing upon the "shoulders of giants" (that
modern man saw farther because he begins with the observations and
learning of the ancients). They possessed a clear view of nature, and modern
man only reflected/refined their vision. These metaphors, of the dwarf/giant
and the reflecting/emanative light, would show up in Swift's satire and
others. Temple's essay was answered by Richard Bentley, the classicist and
William Wotton, the critic. Temple's friends/clients, sometimes known as
the "Christ Church Wits," referring to their association with Christ Church,
Oxford and the guidance of Francis Atterbury, then attacked the "moderns"
(and Wotton in particular). The debate in England lasted only for a few
years.

William Temple was by that point a retired minister, the Secretary of State
for Charles II who had conducted peace negotiations with France. As a
minister, it was beneath his station to answer common and professional
(known then as "hack") authors, so most of the battle took place between
Temple's enemies and Temple's proxies. Notably, Jonathan Swift was not
among the participants, though he was working as Temple's secretary.
Therefore, it is likely that the quarrel was more of a spur to Swift's
imagination than a debate that he felt inclined to enter.

Swift’s rejection of modern physical and political science seems merely ill-
tempered if not viewed in relation to a possible alternative, and it is Leo
Strauss who has elaborated the plausibility, nay, the vital importance, of
that alternative. Now we are able to turn to Swift, not only for amusement
but for possible guidance as to how we should live. Furthermore, Swift’s art
of writing explicitly follows the rhetorical rules for public expression
developed by the ancients, of which we have been reminded by Professor
Strauss. The rhetoric was a result of a comprehensive reflection about the
relation between philosophy and politics, and it points to considerations
neglected by the men of letters of the Enlightenment. Gulliver’s Travels is in
both substance and form a model of the problems which we have been
taught to recognize as our own by Leo Strauss.

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