Two Erasmuses

 Leon-E. Halkin's Erasmus parmi nous, translated by John Tonkin as Erasmus: A Critical Biography, gives a full account of Erasmus's life and works. I am glad to have read it. The author seems a little anxious to emphasize the orthodox side of Erasmus and play down any skepticism one might suspect. The book as I read it seems to me to suffer from a number of drawbacks.

First, that the work is a translation.  Mr. Tonkin's French must be vastly better than mine. Yet here and there I find sentences that make me suspect that something is missing. Then I wish for a sight of the original. Still I know that reading the original would take longer and that in reading it I would make far more mistakes.

Second, that in his advocacy for Erasmus, the author ignores the claims of some of what Erasmus opposed. It is well to mock the ossified end of scholasticism; but Halkin mentions Scotism in passing, dismissively. The nineteenth-century American philosopher C.S. Peirce thought highly of Duns Scotus. On some matters of faith, Erasmus, or maybe just Halkin, seems reluctant to consider what Jaroslav Pelikan refers to as the lex orandi, theology as informed by the prayers of the faithful.

Third, that a biography of a writer ought to live through the writer's words, and this is not practical for a life of Erasmus. His writing was all in Latin, and I don't suppose that the flavor can be wholly brought over into English. Some writers have an adventurous enough life to sustain interest without regard to their writing: Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Hemingway come to mind. But Erasmus mostly wrote and worried about getting together enough money to let him continue to write and publish.

John Huizinga wrote a somewhat shorter book on Erasmus, available in English as Erasmus and the Age of the Reformation. My copy is gone, for it was falling apart when I bought it. Huizinga has a lighter touch, is unburdened--in my recollection--by any commitment to Erasmus's commitment to orthodoxy, and perhaps had a better translator--or perhaps Dutch comes more naturally over to English than French does.

Pelikan gives a brief notice to Erasmus in his The Melody of Theology. His judgments on Erasmus are in the end not that much different from Halkin's. Of course his judgment on the scholastics--represented in this book by Aquinas, not Scotus--takes their strengths into account as well as their weaknesses.

A Business and Its Beliefs

 A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM, by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., was on the outside carts at Second Story Books before Christmas. The book, published in 1963, was part of the McKinsey Foundation Lecture Series, sponsored by the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. It runs to 107 pages, in seven chapters. Watson was then chairman of the board, having succeeded his father as head of the company in the 1950s.

When the book came out, IBM was in the middle of its project to build the System 360. The book makes no reference to the effort, for it was not announced until 1964, and did not begin to deliver computers until 1965. It is said that IBM management bet the company on the project, which cost $5 billion in 1965 dollars. Something of the magnitude of that effort can be inferred from Frederick Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, a reckoning of the lessons learned on the software side of the work.

A Business and Its Beliefs lists three primary beliefs:

1. respect for the individual
2. [a desire] to give the best customer service of any company in the world
3. an organization should pursue all tasks with the idea that they can be accomplished in a superior fashion

 The first reflects a paternalistic IBM that probably did not survive the 1990s, maybe not the 1980s. Watson wrote that IBM had never laid off employees. Now the tech press writes of IBM's urge to replace aging staff, with memos referring to them as "dinobabies". It also writes of salesmen not paid promised commissions.

The third was certainly true of IBM once in many areas, and may yet be in some. A lot of very smart people went through IBM, and came up with some remarkable ideas and technology. IBM management didn't invariably know what do with it--IBM sat on John Cocke's innovations in reduced instruction set computing (RISC), so that Berkeley and Stanford popularized the notion, and it was beaten to market in relational database management systems after it had demonstrated their feasibility with R1. It revolutionized the personal computer market, and fairly promptly lost it.

  The second section of the book, "The Broader Purpose", expresses thoughts less popular in the American business community now. The "Friedman Doctrine" that the social responsibility of a business is to its shareholders, was not offered as such until 1970, and had not occurred to Watson:

It is in this area of national well-being that the business community will be judged most critically in the years ahead. Business has demonstrated how successfully it can innovate and produce. What we must do now--it seems to me--is to assign a higher order of priority to the national interest in our business decisions.

 Watson was therefore in favor of federal aid to education and in favor of something to improve medical care nationwide.

The IBM of that day and somewhat later was notoriously stodgy. It was said that an IBM engineer could demonstrate that he was a genius by growing a beard and not being fired. A man I know who had joined IBM sales on leaving the Navy in the late 1960s said that a co-worker shocked the office by coming to work in suit, tie, and blue shirt--nobody had worn anything but a white shirt before that. I don't know that I'd have cared to work for that version of IBM, but bohemianism can be a pose of its own.

Buffalo and Ghosts

 In Ortega y Gasset's essay "In Search of Goethe from Within" occurs the passage

The Jena of that period [1790 through 1825] signifies a fabulous treasure of lofty mental incitements. Is it not a terrible symptom of Weimar's impenetrability that, though it is not a dozen miles from Jena, Jena never managed to affect Weimar in the slightest? I have never been able to imagine Fichte conversing with Frau von Stein, because I do not believe that a buffalo has ever  been able to converse with a ghost.

(Ortega takes Weimar to have petrified Goethe, to have separated him from his destiny.)

Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Blue Flower mentions the uncanny effect Fichte had, without effort or intention intimidating students who intimidated everyone else. It appears that it was chiefly the novelty of his thought and the difficulty of grasping it that accounted for the effect. Having recently read a bit of Fichte, I sympathize with those students, and I wonder what Charlotte von Stein would have made of his conversation--quite a bit, perhaps, if she knew Kant inside and out, perhaps very little.

"In Search of Goethe from Within" is included in the collection The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture.