Critical Letters Are True Friendship

In reading for my festschrift essay for John Witte ("The Influence of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition on the Common Law"), I ran across this fascinating paragraph by Anthony Grafton on how Johannes Kepler didn't publish a monograph on chronology (i.e., the study of historical dates) but instead developed his scholarship through letters, with Grafton including a great quote from Blake. Enjoy.

At first I regretted the absence of a Chronologia nova or a Great Chronology of the Old Testament--especially as it made the task of expounding Kepler's technical views on any particular subject diabolically complex. But gradually it has become clear to me that Kepler saw chronology, as he and his contemporaries saw some other subjects, as particularly appropriate for treatment in letters--especially letters that exemplified William Blake's principle, "Opposition is true friendship." Kepler described chronology as a field that profited particularly from the open exchange of opinions and criticism, and his own practice as a chronologer exemplified this view at every point. In fact, Kepler's chronological work represented an effort not only to establish the truth about the past but also to set out, systematically, the proper conditions for doing so--conditions that, as Kepler formulated them, had to do with the canons of discussion, often among scholars who belonged to opposing ideological camps.

Anthony Grafton, "Chronology, Controversy, and Community in the Republic of Letters: The Case of Keplar," in World Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009), 124.

Comments

[Frank Drackman]

Kepler, Kepler, was he the Astronomer who got his nose chopped off in a duel??

[Alan Vanneman]

"Interesting", though, as neither Kepler nor Blake were Catholic--and Kepler refused to convert from Lutherism even though it would have helped his career, I guess there's nothing "Catholic" here.

It was Tycho Brache, not Kepler, who lost his nose. Kepler relied heavily on data collected by Brache in formulating his famous laws.

[Dilan Esper]

When I was a research assistant in law school, my professor had written a paper that criticized the position of a federal judge. Before sending the paper out, he sent a copy off to the judge, not expecting anything but feeling it was professional courtesy.

The judge wrote back. He excoriated the paper, as you might expect- but he also provided six or seven really strong criticisms of it. We reworked the paper to take the criticisms into account, more accurately state the judge's position, and put what we thought was a stronger refutation of it. And, of course, thanked the judge in a footnote.

It was all very professional (despite being quite heated) and it made his paper better.