Graham Harman asks:-
What are the great acts of generosity in intellectual history? I’m not saying that generosity has to be free of all selfish motive; in fact, far from it. By “generosity” I mean the decision that someone is worthy of our pouring much of our own scarce energy into furthering their cause (even if it furthers our own as well).
Here are some of the examples that jump immediately to mind:
1. Baudelaire translating the complete tales of Poe. The remarkable thing here is that Baudelaire wasn’t an especially self-disciplined person, and was in fact a bit of a self-indulgent overspender running up debts for frivolities. But it’s remarkable to read the testimony of his friends, who would drop by and find Baudelaire so engrossed in his translation work that he would ignore them and continue. It was as if a sort of demon had possessed Baudelaire. The result is already known: Poe now belongs to French literature perhaps even more than to the American. In fact, this sort of hijacking of the foreign seems to be quite typical of generosity, as you can see from my next example…
2. Averroes (Ibn Rushd) agreeing to write commentaries on all the works of Aristotle. Yes, he was asked to do so by the powerful caliph in Cordoba. But he possibly could have said no, and even once agreeing there was no one who could force him to pour so much energy into it. And here too, the result is well known: Aristotle for a time belonged much more to Islamic philosophy than to European Christian thought.
Good examples, certainly. To be honest, most academic translation work fits the description of intellectual generosity, because academic translation is poorly paid and making a living from it must be very difficult. Translation isn’t well regarded as a publication choice either.
Historically, I’d suggest that Boethius and Isidore of Seville are examples closer to what Graham is thinking of. Without their labours of translation into Latin in the case of Boethius, and compilation in the case of Isidore, the medieval knowledge of the classical world would have been immeasurably poorer. And that means our knowledge of the classical world too, although much was later retrieved directly from the Greek (mediated through the Arabic in some cases). Boethius in particular fits the bill, because he tried to translate all the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. He did several, but not all. So there is also an interesting counterfactual history. Had he completed his task, what would have been different? Works which were effectively lost to the Latin West for several centuries would not then have had the impact they did have when rediscovered.
The second example is the work of Tribonian, employed by the Byzantine emperor Justinian to codify classical Roman law. This was the Corpus Juris Civilis, the body of civil law. It included laws and a compilation of the best legal opinions. The Digest and the Codex are major sources of what the Romans did with the law. Because they were copied after Tribonian’s time, and the source laws much less frequently, these works preserve much that might otherwise have been lost. Though of course it was partly because they existed that the other works were less copied. And the impact Roman law had and continues to have is enormous. Now this doesn’t quite fit Graham’s criteria, as Tribonian was furthering a more diverse body of work than that of a single author, but it is close. And Tribonian is much less known than Justinian, and Tribonian certainly furthered his cause.
