Johan Huizinga

Johan Huizinga (IPA: [joːhɑn hœyzɪŋaː]) (December 7, 1872 - February 1, 1945), a [Netherlands|Dutch]] historian, a philosopher of culture, one of the founders of modern cultural history. Succeeding his predecessor, Jacob Burckhardt of the nineteenth century, Huizinga approached history not from political perspective but from cultural perspective. He conceived history as the totality of comprehensive cultural activities including religion, philosophy, language, customs, arts, literatures, myth, superstitions, and others. He rejected philological methodology for the study of history, and tried to depict the lives, feelings, beliefs, imaginations, tastes, moral and aesthetic senses, embedded in cultural manifestations of the past. He tried to write a history to invite readers to experience the way people in the past lived, felt, and thought. He used visual and literal descriptions to achieve this purpose.

The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), a masterpiece of cultural history which fused the imagery and the conceptual, literature and history, religion and philosophy; established Huizinga as the major cultural historian in the twentieth century, comparable with Jacob Burckhardt of the nineteenth century. At the maturity of his life, Huizinga published Home Ludens: a study of the play element in culture (1938). The work was the culmination of his studies as a cultural historian and a philosopher of culture. In this work, he identified the essence of human beings with “playfulness,” exhibited it as the primordial drive of human existence, and showed it as the archetype of diverse cultural forms. He presented how all forms of human cultures emerged and developed as a modification and manifestation of play.

Life

Born in Groningen, he started out as a student of Sanskrit and did a doctoral thesis on the role of the jester in Indian drama in 1897. It was only in 1902 he turned his interest towards medieval and Renaissance history. He continued teaching as an Orientalist until becoming Professor of General and Dutch History at Groningen University in 1905. Then, in 1915, he was made Professor of General History at Leiden University, a post he held until 1942. From this point until his death in 1945 he was held in detention by the Nazis. He died in De Steeg in Gelderland near Arnhem, and lies buried in the graveyard of the Reformed Church at 6 Haarlemmerstraatweg in Oegstgeest.

Thought and works

Prior to Huizinga in the nineteenth century, Jacob Burckhardt pioneered and established the cultural approach to history. Burckhardt was critical to modern philological and politics-centered approaches, and pioneered to approach history from cultural perspective. Huizinga continued and developed Burckhardt’s approach and contributed to establish a genre of cultural history.

He conceived history as the totality of diverse aspects of human life, including religious faith and other superstitious beliefs, customs, constraints, the sense of morality and beauty, and other elements that constituted their whole cultural life. Huizinga refused conceptual schematization and patterning of history. He rather tried to depict the states of human spirits and thoughts, imbedded in dreams, hopes, fears, anxiety. He particularly focused on the sense of beauty and its artistic expressions and images.

With his literary skills, Huizinga succeeded in depicting how people in the past lived, experienced, and interpreted their cultural lives. History, for him, was not a series of political events, which lacked vivid feelings and experiences of people who lived, but to re-present and revive them to the present time. His monumental work, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919) was written from this perspective.

The work is primarily a study of history, yet it goes beyond the narrow disciplinary genre of history in the sense of the analytical, philological studies of a series of events, and deals with interdisciplinary cultural realms where anthropology, aesthetics, philosophy, mythology, religious studies, art history, and literature are intertwined. While Huizinga paid attention to irrational aspects of human history, he was critical to irrationalism of “philosophy of life.”

At the age of sixty-five, at the maturity of his scholary life, Huizinga published his another masterpiece Home Ludens (1938). This was the culmination of his work as a historian of culture and a philosopher of culture. Other major works include: Erasmus (1924); In the Shadows of Tomorrow (In de schaduwen van Morge, 1935).

The Autumn of the Middle Ages

The Autumn of the Middle Ages, or The Waning of the Middle Ages, (Herfsttij der middeleeuwen, published in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen and translated into English in 1924) is the best-known work by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. Jacob Burckhardt, his predecessor and a pioneer of cultural history, and other historians of his day interpreted Middle Ages as the precursor of Renaissance and described it as the cradle of realism. Furthermore, Burckhardt’s works focused on Italian Renaissance, and did not sufficiently deal with cultures in France, Netherlands, and other parts of Europe, north of Alps.

Huizinga challenged the interpretation of Middle Ages from the perspective of and in continuity with Renaissance. He viewed that: Middle Age cultures flourished and reached its maturity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, reached its end or the Fall in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; just like a living thing in nature, history has its birth and death; late Middle Ages was the period to die and bear the fruits. For example, in the chapter of “Image of Death,” Huizinga depicted fifteenth century as the period when thought of death occupied people’s mind and the “dance of death” became a frequent motif in paintings. He saw pessimism, weariness, and nostalgia for the past, a symptom of dying culture, rather than of rebirth and optimism, a precursor of Renaissance.

The merit of this work lies not only on his unique perspective but also on his literary skills and his approach. Huizinga described and depicted the ways people lived, interpreted their experiences, felt and thought. He tried to give readers a sense of what it was like to live in the period described. In the work, imagery and concepts, values and facts, feelings and intelligence are fused in a literary prose. It is a work on history but a literature and a philosophical work at the same time. One of the unique qualities of the work certainly lies on its unique fusion of and transcending power beyond traditional category of knowledge.

Huizinga's work, however, has later come under criticism, especially for relying too heavily on evidence from the rather exceptional case of the Burgundian court. In spite of its limitation, this wok remains as one of the classic works in cultural history together with works by Jacob Burckhardt. A new English translation of the book has been made because of perceived deficiencies in the original translation.

Homo Ludens

Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture (1938) is another major work of Huizinga, written at his maturity of scholarly life, as the culmination of studies of cultural history. As the title suggests, Huizinga identified the essence of human beings with its playfulness. He presented his philosophical conviction for the essence of man against various previous characterizations of human beings such as “homo sapiens” (a being with intelligence), “homo fabel” (a being who uses tools), “homo erectus” (a being who stands on feet), and others.

Huizinga presented the thesis that all forms of human cultures emerged out of playfulness which was this fundamental drive of human existence. He first attempted to establish autonomous category of “play” and tried to describe cultural history from the perspective of “play.” Employing his broad knowledge of mythology, anthropology, classics, religions, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature, he tried to show how cultural activities such as rituals, languages, religions, technologies, love affairs, arts, sports, competitions, even wars, are rooted in and inseparable from “play” as the archetype of human culture. Form Huizinga’s perspective, human cultural history emerged and developed out of the element of play.

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919)
Erasmus of Rotterdam (1924)
Homo Ludens (1938)
Geyl, P. and F.W.N. Hugenholtz (eds.), Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century and Other Essays (1968)
Holmes, J.S. and H. Van Marle (eds.), Men and Ideas (1970)

^ Van Ditzhuijzen, Jeannette (September 9 2005). Bijna vergeten waren ze, de rustplaatsen van roemruchte voorvaderen. Trouw (Dutch newspaper), p. 9 of supplement.

External links

Biographical notes
Johan Huizinga The Waning of the Middle Ages
Works by Johan Huizinga. Project Gutenberg
Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, available for free via Project Gutenberg (In Original Dutch)

General Philosophy Sources

Credits

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