Andrew's Wiki
Sartor Resartus

A meditation on dualism meant to have the fun hectic style of Sterne but gets bogged down in that passionately earnest quire called Romanticism

Folks

• The English editor, anonymously editing Clothes, their Origin and Influence, a philosophy of clothes written by a German; now wanting to introduce an English audience to it; knows Teuf. slightly
• Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, name: “Devil’s excrement,” living in Fantasy Street of Know-Not-Where City; Professor of Things in General, our author of the book in question; mysterious birth (appears in green silk basket to a rural Prussian couple) and disappearance (disappears after publication in German of his book); tragic adolescence (best friend ran off with best girl)
  • To me, his work is insoluble, contradictory, incoherent
• Herr Heuschreche, acts as the Boswell to Teuf’s Johnson, source of biographical packets that the Editor receives; has written treatise expanding Malthusian population theory
• Lieschen, Teuf’s maid-of-all-work

Themes

• Professor of Things in General
  • A commentary on the professionalization of the university and the specialization and creation of new fields?
  • “In times like ours, when all things are, rapidly or slowly, resolving themselves into Chaos,” they need such a professorship to help create a form, a “body” that’s comprehensible, out of the chaos
  • Modernity is chaotic and needs some seer to make it all coherent
• Philosophy of Clothing
  • It’s the first work of cultural studies
    • Staring bid is that people socially respond to clothes, not the real person, so that society is held together by clothing alone (“not only weaving Cloth; but rapidly enough overturning the whole old system of Society”)
  • A dualist, hence transcendental, philosophy (not monist)
    • Matter and Spirit, Finite and Infinite, Time and Space, Form and Unformable
    • “a celestial Essence thereby rendered visible” (157)
  • Everything sensed, visible is just a manifestation of the infinite, intangible, Idea or Spirit
    • The material world is thus the clothing of the Ideal
    • Also called “Platonic mysticism”
  • All science and philosophy is therefore a Philosophy of Clothes
• Symbol
  • The symbol reveals and conceals
  • A form of silence
  • Merge fantasy and sense (that is, Reason and Understanding)
  • We live in and through symbols b/c real truth is unseen
  • Clothes are symbols, of course
  • Art = a symbol wherein the vehicle is intrinsically related to the tenor
    • (This is also were Carlyle says that all language is metaphor. 57)
• Germanness versus Englishness
  • Superfluous philosophising or sanctuary of abstract thought?
  • English are too practical and mercantile and need some German Romanticism or religion
  • Teuf’s work can be seen as a mixture of the two types because he uses the practical, tangible world of Clothes to talk about the world of Spirit
• Critique of Utilitarianism (versus Romanticism and German Idealism)
  • Seen as the British philosophy, practical, as opposed to German Idealism
  • Calls it “Profit-and-Loss Philosophy” and “Attorney Logic”
    • As if a person’s soul is in his/her stomach
    • Uses bare logic instead of intuition
  • Reduces humans to mechanistic principles and therefore denies their status as manifestations of God
  • We need wonder! Belief in the ideal world and in God
• Form
  • Editor writes the book, so this book is about editing
    • Editor trying to impose form on the chaotic, formless, mess that is Teuf’s book
  • Carlyle talks about philosophy via two screens: the Editor and Teufelsdrockh
  • Irony: Teuf is factitious and sarcastic enough, while the Editor genuinely tries to understand and express his doubts and likes to the audience
  • Self-reflexiveness is on a level with Nabokov
  • Style
    • Editor’s Style: Negation of the negation: “not wholly unadmirable;” “not without insight”
    • Teuf’s Style: the editor critiques it for being too shot with metaphors and high-flown Romantic exaggeration and circumlocution
  • To understand writing, you must know biographer of writer
• Necessity of Action
  • Conviction is nothing without conduct (cf Eliot in Deronda too, where Daniel is just a well-meaning wandered until he finds his path in life, a political Zionism)
• Everlasting Yea
  • Yea: Clear, resolute faith in God
    • See God in the everyday: the “natural supernaturalism” of Transcendentalism (explains why Emerson wrote a preface for this book)
  • Center of Indifference: like Buddha, you must develop supreme indifference before you can really see God
  • Everlasting Nay: denial of the divine in the world and self, like Mephistopheles
  • Chapter headings lead Teuf from Everlasting No to Centre of Indifference to Everlasting Yea: rejection to indifference (non-belief, detachment, lack of desire) to affirmation
  • Compare to Nietzsche’s affirmation
• Victorian-ness
  • Wrangling with religion
    • Says new religion is literature, newspapers
  • Preoccupation with death and immortality
  • Editor is strict moralist, finding fault with Teuf’s religious doubts, his darkness; finally disapproving though he cannot wholly blame Teuf
• Dandy
  • “The Dandiacal Body,” chapter 10, book 3
  • Dandy sublimates religion into a religion of clothes, but worshipping self
  • Their other half is the Poor-Slaves, the drudges, who are their opposite side b/c of money versus hunger making the different in their lives

Quotes

• On Utilitarianism
  • “To many a Royal Society, the Creation of a World is little more mysterious than the cooking of a Dumpling” (3)
  • “Logic-choppers, and treble-pipe Scoffers, and professed Enemies to Wonder” (53)
  • “But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of Conscience to the diseases of the Liver!” (125)
  • “The universe was all void of Life… one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on.” (127)
  • makes man “a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pleasures and Pains on” (167)
  • “only a kind of Digestive, Mechanic life remains” (167)
  • (Also, Attorney Logic and Profit-and-Loss Philosophy)
• On New Fields of Knowledge
  • “founding new habitable colonies in the immeasurable circumambient realm of Nothingness and Night!” (5)
  • “We are to guide our British friends into the new Gold-country” (157)
• On Victorian scene-painting
  • “Never, as I compute, till after the Sorrows of Werther, was there a man who would say: Come let us make a Description!” (118)

Comps Questions

• Work
  • Our vocation is to work (71), our “Whole Duty, which is to Move, to Work” (99), “everything being that can live can do something; this let him do” (150)
  • “Produce! Produce!...Tis the utmost thou hast in thee” (149)
  • “Not what I Have…but what I Do is my Kingdom” (93), “Know Thyself” should really be “Know what thou canst work at” (126)
  • “We must all toil,” but there are two types of labor, both of which he admires:
    • The Low: the “toilworn Craftsman” (172) who is “encrusted…with the thick adhesions and defacements of Labor” (173)
    • The High: the worker not for Bread, but working for the Bread of Life, the Thinker (173)
  • Because of course he says we’re not just “a mere Work-Machine,” not just so that “money and money’s worth may be realised” (196); instead, we have to have Wonder
• Property
  • Society for the Conservation of Property: Teuf has been involved in this society (150)
  • Teuf points out that all law codes are for property, just like Marx (151)