T. K. Seung - Cultural Thematics: The Formation of The Faustian Ethos (1976)

Cultural Thematics: The Formation of The Faustian Ethos (1976)

In Cultural Thematics, Seung says that his trinitarian reading of the Commedia was originally inspired by two major movements in the humanities at the time. One was the formalistic program of New Criticism with its preference for close reading under the slogan “Back to the text,” and the other was European phenomenology with its motto “Let the object reveal itself instead of imposing one’s preconception upon it.” Though never abandoning the phenomenological motto, Seung came to have serious doubts about the formalistic approach to textual interpretation. The outcome of these misgivings is presented in his trilogy, Cultural Thematics, Structuralism and Hermeneutics, and Semiotics and Thematics in Hermeneutics. In the first book Seung constructively demonstrates the role of cultural context in the explication of textual meaning. In the second book he systematically examines the danger of misinterpretation inherent in the formalist and post-structuralist programs of textual interpretation, due to their disregard of contextual considerations. In the third book he takes into account the theoretical assumptions and methodological commitments that the first two books presuppose, and presents a fully elaborate theory of how to combine the phenomenological approach to textual meaning with the hermeneutic assertion that cultural contextualism is the prerequisite for adequate textual understanding and interpretation.

Seung substantiates his trinitarian reading of the Commedia with a cultural contextualist examination of the intellectual development of medieval thinkers and writers during the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries. He focuses on two pairs of triads in this development: on the one hand, the intellectual differences encountered in the works of the Franciscan Bonaventure, the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, and the Franciscan Duns Scotus, and on the other hand, the literary differences displayed in the works of the three writers that constitute the Italian Trecento literature: Dante, Francesco Petrarca, and Giovanni Boccaccio. Seung argues that these two triads, though not entirely corresponding in time and place, unfold some of the crucial premises for understanding the emergence of the modern secular ethos during the late Middle Ages. Seung speaks of the formation of the Faustian ethos with reference to Oswald Spengler, who, in the Decline of the West, speaks of the Faustian man as a medieval invention.

In demarcating the intellectual differences between the three philosophers and the three writers, Seung uses the term “sensibility.” The term is carefully chosen as an alternative to the term “idea,” which is often used in historicist studies of intellectual developments and changes. Sensibility refers to the way in which human beings conceive their being in the world without necessarily formulating a specific ideological system or a rigid pattern of ideas. In this regard, Seung’s theory of cultural contextualism has some affinity with Eric Voegelin’s approach to historical phenomena in that the latter came to regard the term “idea” as a misconception when we try to understand how human beings experience their being in the world and act out their experiential conceptions in their every day life as well as in political and judicial forums and social institutions.

The book generated positive reviews, including one from Frank J. Warnke from the University of Georgia: "one cannot question the subtlety and intellectual rigor of his study, the quality of excitement that permeates it, and the illumination it sheds on a great and complex period of Western culture." The noted historian of modern philosophy, A. P. Martinich, wrote, "It is a work of intelligence and imagination; it deals subtly and originally with a complex and difficult topic; and, in characterizing the modern sensibility, it also addresses the crisis of contemporary philosophy. We who "are living in the waning days of the Faustian culture" (p. xi) experience anomie. We sense that something new is almost upon us, and we do not know what it is. Perhaps understanding what we were will help us through the change."