between the Ancients and the Moderns is described by Joseph M. Levine as, "how far to imitate the classics and how far to risk the freedom to innovate."
However, another view, by Rosen, argues that "the quarrel that is significant is not between ancients and moderns but between philosophy and sophistry, for the continuous attempt of Western civilization to prevent playfulness from degenerating into frivolity constitutes the unity of historical experience."
Here are some additional links to authors with an online paragraph or so of commentary on the Quarrel, including Schiller: "Antique poetry now is equated with the naive mode of perception (naive Empfindungsweise). Naive poets live in inner harmony and unity with nature, and their works of art are produced spontaneously and in the absence of poetic self-consciousness. The poetry of modernity, on the other hand, is sentimental in outlook (Schiller's German term is sentimentalisch rather than sentimental). Sentimental poets are self-reflective and skeptical of inspiration, they are apprehensive of the psychological abyss that dissociates their own age from antiquity, and they feel their cultural and moral self cut off from the harmony of senses and from the union with nature that they ascribe to the writers of antiquity."
Terms I'm still struggling with:
synchrony, as in "an idealization of synchronic modes of understanding" (3). Locke is described by Labio as "almost exclusively synchronic" (10), which must mean that "knowing" and/or consciousness itself is taken to be a simultaneous event?
Later, "Descartes's narratives also have a definite static, or synchronic, as well as visual quality" (31).
This is opposed to diachronic views.
I think this is a different argument than the "absolute/transcendent" vs "contingent" truth argument, right?
asymptotic, as in "humanity, which has given birth to itself by severing itself from its aboriginal nature through that first flash of consciousness that marks it as secondary and asymptotic" (62). This is in reference to the first naming of thunder (what Enoch might call a "decree"?) which separated the human from the un or a-human who preceded us evolutionarily. I think what asymptotic means is that the approach can never be consummated - perhaps an example of what Briankle might call a promise? One can get closer and closer and yet never actually touch (arrive at) the desired object.
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