George Steiner (1929-2020)

Feb 4, 2020

THE POLYMATH George Steiner has died at the age of 90. Martin Amis mocked him for being unable to talk about anything without referring to the Holocaust, the principle of entropy or Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, but he was always one of my cultural heroes. For better or worse he provided a gateway for me in my formative years, especially with the wonderful and groundbreaking After Babel, from which I got my fondness for words like “agonistic” and my enthusiasm for thinkers like Ernst Bloch.

I remember a debate on television about 25 years ago between Steiner and the poet Joseph Brodsky, Steiner repeated his well-known thesis, that cultural life in liberal democracies is turned to pulp, is replaced with kitsch and pornography and mass production. It is a taboo we ought to acknowledge, he said: the awful tyrannies in Eastern Europe sprang from an overestimation of Man, and they allowed the masterpieces of Europe - Goethe, Beethoven - to remain a part of mass culture. It was a theme he took on in his short novella, Proofs, an exemplar of concision, erudition and precision.

I read through the opening chapters of his unapologetically high-brow memoir, Errata. His life’s mission was to resist “theory”, celebrate unending multiplicity and revel in what the poet Louis MacNiece called the “suddenness of things being various” and what Blake described as “the holiness of the minute particular”. 

There was simply too much to everything. Existence thronged and hummed with obstinate difference like the midges around the light-bulb. “Who can number the clouds in wisdom? Or who can stay the bottles of heaven?”…. How could the senses, how could the brain impose order and coherence on the kaleidoscope, on the perpetuum mobile of swarming existence?

Steiner did more than anyone else to find such order and coherence across topics ranging from Martin Heidegger to the intricacies of chess. He not only enriched our understanding of philosophy and linguistics, he also made us relish the vast possibilities and pluralities of knowledge.