Digital 1800

Writing at the dawn of the computer age, the famous logician Kurt Gödel looked back to the period around 1800 in order to describe the developments in mathematics around 1900. Gödel's fame rested on his incompleteness theorems of the early 1930s, which showed that any formalized system of mathematics will contain statements that cannot be proven true or false by the axioms that define that system. And, yet, the constraints implied by his work regarding the solvability of every mathematical problem disappear, Gödel wrote in 1961, if one continues to add new axioms to the system—an idea that "agrees in principle with the Kantian conception of mathematics." Indeed, Kant's claims regarding mathematics, made most notably at the outset of The Critique of Pure Reason, are "incorrect if taken literally, since Kant asserts that in the derivation of geometrical theorems we always need new geometrical intuitions," Gödel continues, and "therefore a purely logical derivation from a finite number of axioms is impossible. That is demonstrably false. However, if in this proposition we replace the term 'geometrical'—by 'mathematical' or 'set-theoretical,' then it becomes a demonstrably true proposition." For Gödel, it was "a general feature of many of Kant's assertions that literally understood they are false but in a broader sense contain deep truths."¹ Although Gödel himself was not involved in the birth of the digital computer, these passages suggest that the mathematical-logical developments of the early twentieth century that led to the first computers are essentially an extension of the Kantian project. In fact, there exists an oblique yet significant relationship of um 1800 to a group of thinkers who created the digital universe and, hence, to our conception of the digital itself.

The relationship between digital computing and um 1800 is reciprocal, perhaps uniquely so, and this reciprocity flips the questions of this forum on its head. It is widely recognized, for instance, that mass digitization has changed not only the methods of researching and analyzing literature, but also cultural histories of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (as their materials often evade copyright).² At the same time, narratives of the digital revolution, from Walter Isaacson's popular The Innovators to Warren Sack's The Software Arts, acknowledge the crucial role that philosophy and poetry played in the advent of the digital, especially in the work of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron, who first grasped and laid out the principles of programming for one of the first computers. Perhaps what we see here is a recognition, as the computer and computational analyses enter history, that the period around 1800 asked the right question: What forms—aesthetic, social, and otherwise—will the synthesis of quality and quantity, the merger of pure reason and embodied cognition give rise to?

Our contribution to this forum seeks to point to a few representative texts from um 1800 (a new, digital canon) that attempt to come to terms in theory with what the digital revolution has, in the intervening two centuries, made everyday practice. Seen from the angle of the digital revolution, um 1800 begins with Leibniz and ends with Lovelace. Its thick middle is constituted by an intellectual confrontation between quality and quantity, synthetic and analytic judgment, thought and machine that remained in force at least through the middle of the twentieth century. The urgency of exploring this canon is not just a call for the renewed relevance of studying the Age of Goethe. To recover a predigital canon um 1800 in this fashion is to seek ways to negotiate between the blind application of digital tools to texts and the naive objections raised by literary traditionalism. To read the great unread means fashioning a method of reading that uses literary-theoretical tools to understand and implement digital methods. And to teach the Age of Goethe in our digital moment means challenging our students to think about the digital as we introduce them to its techniques.

Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, turned to Leibniz as a "patron saint" and the mantra of the early digital...